Firefox 64-bit for Windows can take advantage of more memory

By default, on Windows, Firefox is a 32-bit application. This means that it is limited to using at most 4 GiB of memory, even on machines that have more than 4 GiB of physical memory (RAM). In fact, depending on the OS configuration, the limit may be as low as 2 GiB.

Now, 2–4 GiB might sound like a lot of memory, but it’s not that unusual for power users to use that much. This includes:

• users with many (dozens or even hundreds) of tabs open;
• users with many (dozens) of extensions;
• users of memory-hungry web sites and web apps; and
• users who do all of the above!

Furthermore, in practice it’s not possible to totally fill up this available space because fragmentation inevitably occurs. For example, Firefox might need to make a 10 MiB allocation and there might be more than 10 MiB of unused memory, but if that available memory is divided into many pieces all of which are smaller than 10 MiB, then the allocation will fail.

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