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Seems sensible. Only 2.6% of users (with telemetry enabled) are using 32-bit Windows while 6.4% are using 32-bit Firefox on 64-bit Windows[0]. 32-bit Linux migh
by e2le 1y ago
Seems sensible. Only 2.6% of users (with telemetry enabled) are using 32-bit Windows while 6.4% are using 32-bit Firefox on 64-bit Windows[0]. 32-bit Linux might see more use however isn't included in the stats, only 5.3% of users are running Linux[1] and I doubt many enable telemetry.
Maybe they could also drop support for older x86_64 CPU's, releasing more optimised builds. Most Linux distributions are increasing their baseline to x84-64-v2 or higher, most Firefox users (>90%)[0] seem to meet at least x84-64-v2 requirements.
[0]: https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/#view=system https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/#view=system
[1]: https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/#view=general https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/#view=general
- kstrauser 1y agoI’d have to agree. I doubt there are that many (in relative terms) people browsing the web on 32-bit CPUs and expecting modern experiences. I’ve gotta imagine it would be pretty miserable, what with the inherent RAM limitations on those older systems, and I’m sure JavaScript engines aren’t setting speed records on Pentium 4s.
- Wowfunhappy 1y agoI haven’t tried it, but as bloated as the web is, I don’t think it’s so bad that you need gigabytes of memory or a blazing fast CPU to e.g. read a news website. As long as you don’t open a million tabs and aren’t expecting to edit complex Figma projects, I’d expect browsing the web with a Pentium + a lightweight distro to be mostly fine. Idk, I think this is sad. Reviving old hardware has long been one thing Linux is really great at.
- doubled112 1y agoTry it and come back to let us know. The modern web is incredibly heavy. Videos everywhere, tons of JavaScript, etc. My wife had an HP Stream thing with an Intel N3060 CPU and 4GB of RAM. I warned her but it was cheap enough it almost got the job done. Gmail's web interface would take almost a minute to load. It uses about 500MB of RAM by itself running Chrome. Does browsing the web include checking your email? Not if you need web mail, apparently. Check out the memory usage for yourself one of these days on the things you use daily. Could you still do them?
- zozbot234 1y agoA lightweight Linux desktop still works fine for very basic tasks with 4GB RAM, and that's without even setting up compressed RAM swap. The older 2GB netbooks and tablets might be at the end of the road, though.
- kstrauser 1y agoI don’t think web browsing is a very basic task anymore, though. A substantial portion of new sites are React SPAs with a lot of client processing demands.
- zozbot234 1y agoThe other issue AIUI and a more pressing one, is that the browser itself is getting a lot heavier wrt. RAM usage, even when simply showing a blank page. That's what ends up being limiting for very-low-RAM setups.
- anthk 1y agoChromium has a --light switch. And, for the rest, git-clone gopher://bitreich.org/privacy-haters, look up the Unix script for Chrome variables and copy the --arguments stuff for the Chromium launcher under Wndows. Add UBock origin too. 4GB of RAM should be more than enough.
- niutech 1y agoWhat is this --light switch? I cannot see it at https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/ https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/
- Wowfunhappy 1y agoHuh. The reason I'm surprised is that I'm able to comfortably browse the web in virtual machines with only 1 cpu core and 2 gb of memory, even when the VM is simultaneously compiling software. This is only opening 1-2 tabs at a time, mind you.
- mschuster91 1y agoI have a ThinkPad X1 Gen3 Tablet (20KK) here for my Windows needs, my daily driver is a M2 MBA, and my work machine is a 2019 16-inch MBP (although admitted, that beast got an i9...). Got the Thinkpad for half the ebay value on a hamfest. Made in 2018-ish, i5-8350U CPU... It's a nice thing, the form factor is awesome and so is the built-in LTE modem. The problem is, more than a dozen Chrome tabs and it slows to a crawl. Even the prior work machine, a 2015 MBP, performed better. And yes you absolutely need a beefy CPU for a news site. Just look at Süddeutsche Zeitung, a reputable newspaper. 178 requests, 1.9 MB, 33 seconds load time. And almost all of that crap is some sort of advertising - and that despite me being an actually subscribed customer with adblock enabled on top of that.
- anthk 1y ago- Install chromium - Ublock origin instead of AdBlock - git clone git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters - either copy the chromium file to /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh under GNU/Linux/BSD and chmod +x it, or copy the --arguments array to the desktop launcher path under Windows, such as C:\foo\bar\chrome.exe" --huge-ass-list-of-arguments-copied-there. Altough this is HN; so I would just suggest disabling JS under the UBo settings and enabling the advanced settings under Ubo. Now, click on the UBo origin and mark the 3rd party scripts and such in red; and leave out the 1st party images/requests and enabled. Then, starting accepting newspapers' domains and CDN's until it works. The CPU usage will plummet down.
- niutech 1y agoWho uses RAM-eating Chrome on an old computer? There are many lightweight alternatives: K-Meleon, Otter Browser, Pale Moon, Waterfox.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoYeah consumer CPUs have been 64-bit since what, the PowerPC G5 (2003), Athlon 64 (2003), and Core 2 (2006)? There were a few 32-bit x86 CPUs that were released afterward, but they were things like Atoms which were quite weak even for the time and would be practically useless on the modern internet. More generally I feel that Core 2 serves as a pretty good line in the sand across the board. It’s not too hard to make machines of that vintage useful, but becomes progressively challenging with anything older.
- selectodude 1y agoIntel Prescott, so like 2004.
- kstrauser 1y agoI mentioned elswewhere, but Apple started selling 32 bit Core (not Core 2) MacBook Pros in 2006. Those seemed dated even at the time. I’d call them basically the last of the 32 bit premium computers from a major vendor. Frankly, anything older than that sucks so much power per unit of work that I wouldn’t want to use them for anything other than a space heater.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoFor what it's worth, people may have been running 64-bit CPUs, but many were still on 32-bit OSes. I was on 32-bit XP until I upgraded to 64-bit Win7.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI have to imagine that group to be pretty small by now, though. Most PCs with specs good enough to still be useful now run W7 64-bit about as well as they do XP SP3 (an old C2D box of mine feels great under 7, as an anecdote), and for those who’ve been running Linux on these boxes there’s not really much reason to go for a 32-bit build over a 64-bit one.
- niutech 1y agoYou forgot to mention RAM. Old PCs have often <=4GB RAM and 32-bit browsers use less RAM: https://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/03/32-bit-vs-64-bit-browsers-which-version-has-the-edge/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/03/32-bit-vs-64-bit-browsers-...
- anthk 1y ago32 bit Atom netbook. I use offpunk, gopher://magical.fish among tons of services (and HN work straight there) and gemini://gemi.dev over the gemini protocol with Telescope as the client. Mpv+yt-dlp+streamlink complement the video support. Miserable? Go try browsing the web without UBlock Origin today under an i3.
- pigeons 1y agoThat seems like a lot of people to abandon! Perhaps the right financial decision, I don't know, but that seems like a significant number of users.
- metalliqaz 1y agowithin those numbers are people who don't really have a preference one way or another, and just didn't bother to upgrade. I have to imagine that the group of people that must use 32-bit and need modern features is vanishingly small.
- kstrauser 1y agoI think that’s the right way to look at it. If you want a 32 bit system to play with as a hobby, you know you’re going to bump into roadblocks. And if you’re using a 20 year old system for non-hobby stuff, you already know there’s a lot of things that don’t work anymore.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>And if you’re using a 20 year old system for non-hobby stuff, you already know there’s a lot of things that don’t work anymore. Mate, 20 year old system means a Pentium 4 Prescott and Athlon 64, both of which had 64 bit support. And in another year after we already had dual core 64 bit CPUs. So if you're stuck on 32 bit CPUs then your system is even older than 20 years.
- kstrauser 1y agoThat was a transitional time. Intel Core CPUs launched as 32 bit in 2006, and the first Intel Macs around then used them. OS X Lion dropped support for 32 bit Intel in 2011. So you could very well have bought a decent quality 32 bit system after 2005, although the writing was on the wall long before then.
- zokier 1y ago
- darkmighty 1y ago> Maybe they could also drop support for older x86_64 CPU's, releasing more optimised builds Question: Don't optimizers support multiple ISA versions, similar to web polyfill, and run the appropriate instructions at runtime? I suppose the runtime checks have some cost. At least I don't think I've ever run anything that errored out due to specific missing instructions.
- igrunert 1y agoA CMPXCHG16B instruction is going to be faster than a function call; and if the function is inlined there's still binary size cost. The last processor without the CMPXCHG16B instruction was released in 2006 so far as I can tell. Windows 8.1 64-bit had a hard requirement on the CMPXCHG16B instruction, and that was released in 2013 (and is no longer supported as of 2023). At minimum Firefox should be building with -mcx16 for the Windows builds - it's a hard requirement for the underlying operating system anyway.
- enedil 1y agoLet me play devil's advocate: for some reason, functions such as strcpy in glibc have multiple runtime implementations and are selected by the dynamic linker at load time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- crest 1y agoAfaik runtime linkers can't convert a function call into a single non-call instruction.
- PhilipRoman 1y agoLinux kernel has an interesting optimization using the ALTERNATIVE macro, where you can directly specify one of two instructions and it will be patched at runtime depending on cpu flags. No function calls needed (although you can have a function call as one of the instructions). It's a bit more messy in userspace where you have to respect platform page flags, etc. but it should be possible.
- snackbroken 1y agoLess than 2.6% of browser users (with telemetry enabled) are using Firefox. Should the web drop support for Firefox? Seems sensible. (I would hope not)
- Ukv 1y agoIt'd be ~0.1% of Firefox users that use 32-bit Linux, extrapolating from e2le's statistics, not 2.6%. Have to draw the line at some point if an old platform is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain - websites today aren't generally still expected to work in IE6.
- ohdeargodno 1y ago[dead]
- zamadatix 1y agoFirefox shouldn't need special support by the web, the same relationship can't be said of architecture specific binaries.
- arp242 1y ago> 32-bit Linux might see more use Probably less, not more. Many distros either stopped supporting 32bit systems, or are planning to. As the announcement says, that's why they're stopping support now.
- 3np 1y agoI believe even Raspberry Pi4B and 400 are still only having first-class drivers for 32-bit? Kiosks and desktops and whatnot on Raspis still on 32-bit and likely to have Firefox without telemetry.
- xorcist 1y agoWhy is it reasonable? I understand that it would be financially reasonable for a commercial endeavour, but isn't Firefox more like an open source project? Debian supports MIPS and SPARC still. Last I checked OpenSSL is kept buildable on OpenVMS. Surely there must be a handful of people out there who cares about good old x86? If your numbers are correct, there are millions if not tens of millions of Firefox users on 32-bit. If none of them are willing to keep Firefox buildable, there must be something more to it.
- dtech 1y agoAn open source project should also use its resources effectively. There is always the possibility for a community fork.
- padenot 1y agoDebian has stopped supporting x86 32bits recently, Chrome did so 9 years or so ago. We've carefully ran some numbers before doing this, and this affects a few hundreds to a few thousand people (hard to say, ballpark), and most of those people are on 64bits CPUs, but are using a 32bits Firefox or 32bits userspace. The comparatively high ratio of 32bits users on Windows is not naively applicable to the Linux Desktop population, that has migrated ages ago.
- xorcist 1y agoTo expand a bit on that, the i386 support that was recently deprecated to "partially supported" in Debian refers to project status. Unsupported architecture can not be considered blockers, for example. The packages are still being built, are published on the mirrors, and will be for the forseeable future as long as enough people care to keep it alive. That's the specific meaning of support that it was my intention to point out. Free software projects usually do not "support" software in the commercial sense, but consider platforms supported when there are enough persons to keep the build alive and up to date with the changing build requirements etc. It was my expectation that Firefox was more like free software project than a commercial product, but perhaps that is not the case? Commercial products have to care about not spreading their resources thin, but for open source cause and effect are the other way around: The resources available is usually the incoming paramter that decides what is possible to support. Hence my surprise that not enough people are willing to support a platform that has thousands of users and isn't particularly exotic, especially compared to what mainstream distributions like Debian already build.
- postepowanieadm 1y agoWhat's the threshold for minority to be ignored?
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoThat's surprising. Why is there such a comparatively large number using 32-bit Firefox on 64-bit Windows?
- ars 1y agoIf they are like me, they simply never realized they needed to re-install Firefox after upgrading the OS. Mozilla should try to automate this switch where the system is compatible to it.
- bmicraft 1y agoSome people are under the misapprehension that 32-bit programs need less ram, which might explain that, but that's still a large number regardless.
- niutech 1y agoIt's not a mistake, it's a fact: https://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/03/32-bit-vs-64-bit-browsers-which-version-has-the-edge/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/03/32-bit-vs-64-bit-browsers-...