Firefox Ending 32-bit Linux Support Next Year 40
Mozilla announced today that they will end 32-bit Linux support for Firefox in 2026, with version 144 being the last release and ESR 140 as the fallback option. Phoronix reports: Firefox has continued providing 32-bit Linux binaries even with most other web browsers and operating systems going all-in on x86_64 support. But given that 32-bit Linux support is waning by distributions and the vast majority of distributions aren't even shipping i686 install images anymore, they will be removing 32-bit Linux builds in 2026.
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Brendan Eich who got cancelled in 2014 for supporting California's Proposition 8 in 2008.
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Brendan Eich, I didn't know you had an account here.
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Refusing to use the only functional browser over an old political grudge?
That's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
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Eich wasn't fired. He resigned because he believed that was the best thing he could do for the organization.
We need Firefox today as much, if not more, than we did in the days of IE6. Don't be a fool.
How many tabs could you have open with 32-bit? (Score:2)
I'm guessing 2.
Re:How many tabs could you have open with 32-bit? (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox can spawn multiple processes to run groups of tabs. The browser as a whole isn't limited to 4GB of address space when compiled as 32 bit.
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How much CPU power does a machine have that can't run a 64bit OS and browser? Would such a machine cope with even a single tab of a modern bloated website?
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How much CPU power does a machine have that can't run a 64bit OS and browser? Would such a machine cope with even a single tab of a modern bloated website?
You would be surprised what some 32 bit only machines can do.
But at this stage, most machines running a 32 bit OS are machines capable of 64 bit operation, but that have a very expensive or very critical peripheral that has only 32 bit drivers.
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Tell me one thing you do now that you couldn't do on a 32-bit system.
The Apollo moon lander only had 8-12 bit memory.
If you need a 64-bit system to do what we did on far less in the 70s, well, that's a skill issue.
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Tell me one thing you do now that you couldn't do on a 32-bit system
You're not wrong, but there are real advantages to using a 64-bit system over a 32-bit system. They might not be as dramatic as the difference between a 16-bit and 32-bit system, but that doesn't mean its pointless.
As for modern software, things are ... bad. Absurdly so. The biggest problem, I think, was that we've inexplicably told multiple generations of developers not to worry about resource use. Memory is infinite, CPUs will always get faster, and other nonsense. Computers are faster than ever and
Old! (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Firefox Ending 32-bit Linux Support Next Year"
It seems sad, but 32-bit-only systems are now really, really old. And browsing the modern Internet with a machine that old has to be really, really, really slow. And it probably has nowhere near enough RAM either (and lord help you if you are swapping onto spinning rust with an ancient 32 bit system).
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You certainly don't need GPU hardware acceleration for web browsing, even if you watch a lot of videos. I have it turned off in Firefox because it was causing some freezes/crashes, and I haven't had any problems without it, I've encountered nothing at all that feels slow. Perhaps some browser games would be slow, but not the ones I play... perhaps 4K video would be slow, but I'm more than happy with 720p.
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True, Aquafox on PPC is not by any means quick.
Maybe? (Score:2)
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If your machine supports 64bit then most all of the accelerated parts and newer instructions are being used and you're just limiting the address space to 32 bit via PAE which doesn't actually slow anything down - its not a '32 bit only' system as the parent was talking about.
64 bit has been a thing for decades now, and I think the last time a 32bit only system was sold was almost 8-10 years ago. Why waste the resources for the 10 people who are still actively using this?? Windows 7 is unsupported, a
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It's really more a case against the modern web than it is Pentium IIIs
Is it though? I feel like I can do and achieve a lot more on the modern web than I can on Pentium IIIs. Now excuse me while I run a full office suite in my browser to send an email about a video conference call in my browser to discuss the 4K youtube video I'm watching in my browser all at once.
Re: Old! (Score:2)
The last 32 bit system I bought/built was an Athlon XP Barton core in 2003. Which I upgraded to a socket 939 Clawhammer (Athlon 64) in 2005. Done with 32 bit 20 years ago. Unless I guess you count my old Nexus S phone?
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But Steam for Linux still only available as 32-bit (Score:2)
Steam for Linux is the key app that blocked this recent Fedora change - https://www.phoronix.com/news/... [phoronix.com]
Any of their OSes I can see on their https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com] are using 64-bit.
I get old games makes it more difficult, but we need a 64-bit version of Steam to start making progress. They can still maintain old libs for those games in Steam itself (as they already do...)
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All of my Linux Steam games have already stopped working.
Proprietary software is always a ticking time bomb.
It is quite sad how old Linux software often won't run on newer systems. Luckily there is nothing stopping you from running an older Linux in an emulator or virtual machine, but that feels like a sad workaround and you can do the same thing with Windows.
Steam itself really should be 64 bit by now. I run almost no Linux native games, and where there is both a Windows version and a Linux version, I always run the Windows version. Usually the Linux version was half-assed, and/or support is half-assed. It's als
I wonder (Score:2)
I wonder if this means they will stop providing 32 bit binaries only, but you can still compile it yourself. Or are they going to start using 64 bit only statements.
NetBSD and Slackware still compiles Firefox for their 32 bit systems. Will that be able to will continue ? OpenBSD dropped Firefox of i386 a release or 2 ago. FreeBSD is dropping 32 bit support, so a non-issue there.
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"32-bit Linux is no longer widely supported by the vast majority of Linux distributions, and maintaining Firefox on this platform has become increasingly difficult and unreliable"
That sounds like they have to do more than just compile it. So I think it will slowly rot and fail to compile, unless someone forks it.
Pentium 1 (Score:1)
Guess Linux distros like T2 (Score:2)
'bout time (Score:2)
Any time I see a "Xxx company is ending 32-bit support" in generally shocked that they were still supporting 32-bit systems...
I guess I'm also still shocked that we are all still using IPv4.
IT is a much slower industry than my brain wants it to be.
32 bit should have been sunsetted ages ago (Score:1)
What about 32-bit Raspberry Pi? (Score:3)
What about the line of 32-bit Raspberry Pi devices with 32-bit arm32 v7?
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At worst, you can always just compile your own. Granted, the Mozilla codebase is (last I checked, which admittedly has been several years) significantly more of a pain to compile than the average open-source project, but it's not _prohibitively_ difficult. You do have to read a few lines of documentation and maybe edit a small config file, but there's nothing really tricky about it. Frankly, it's easier than installing most third-party bin
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I feel like you missed a couple of details. I wasn't talking about i386 builds *at all*.