64-bit firefox

[Mikhail T.]

After a rather ungratifying exchange with some of the prominent Mozilla
project members, here is my conclusion.

The "old" firefox-1.x is not expected to run on amd64. Lucky you, if it
does. The code for the branch was forked a long time ago (circa April
2004, AFAIK) and only "security fixes" get merged into it.

Do not bother submitting patches -- you will be yelled at
unceremoniously for wasting developers' time with patches against an
obsolete version and accused of other misdemeanors.

The upcoming version of the browser -- "Deer Park", a.k.a. 1.5 --
currently in alpha2, is supposed to come off the trunk of their
cvs tree, which already contains a lot of bug-fixes, including
64bit-specific ones, but these will NOT be merged into the firefox-1.x
branch.

Those fixes aren't great -- "long", for example, is used in lieu of
"intptr_t" (MSVC is not C99-compliant, so screw you), but they just
happen to work for now.

I think, we need to concentrate on porting this new Deer Park version
(www/deerpark ?) in preferance of the current (www/firefox). Although
alpha, it, apparently, has a better chance of working right on our
"unusual" set of platforms.

The 1.5 release is expected in September.

Those wanting a stabler browser right now ought to use linux-firefox,
opera, or konqueror.

Comments?

	-mi

P.S. I have a seemingly working firefox right now on FreeBSD/amd64.
I even have some extensions loaded. But installing the Forecastfox
extension hoses it reliably, which does not happen with the 32-bit
versions (neither linux-firefox on amd64, nor native on i386).