How can I handle numbers bigger than 17-digits in Firefox/IE7?

Question

For a web application I want to be able to handle numbers up to 64 bits in size. During testing, I found that javascript (or the browser as a whole) seems to handle as much

Answer 1

In Javascript, all numbers are IEEE double precision floating point numbers, which means that you only have about 16 digits of precision; the remainder of the 64 bits are reserved for the exponent. As Fabien notes, you will need to work some tricks to get more precision if you need all 64 bits.