Mozilla Firefox 53.0 Released, Drops Old Linux CPU Support

[M@yeulC]

If SSE2 and portable C codepaths exist in the same binary, choosing between them at run-time might take... 4 cycles on each call.

Don't executables update function pointers when they are launched, to set the right code paths? That would yield even less overhead, besides binary size.

[aufkrawall]

Firefox experience on GNU/Linux with Nvidia blob driver is just horrible (no matter what DE etc), UI and scrolling is prone to lag even with 1 tab even on very modern desktop, my old laptop with i3 1.4Ghz and HD3000 does hell lot of better on i915 driver.

My performance with Nvidia is ok after enabling OGL rendering, doesn't feel much worse than Windows in most situations.
DE shouldn't really matter if nothing's broken. Works fine for me on Plasma and Gnome.

[ua=42]

Yeah. It doesn't seem to be a big deal. I can litterally find newer computers that work at the local dump. Or you could spend $50 and get a rasberry pi.

[s_j_newbury]

I really have an issue with all these non-portable dependencies on specific extensions of particular ISAs. It's one thing to add accelerated codepaths or better yet call out to external acceleration libraries like liboil, but dropping generic portable code is just wrong. Depending on ISA extensions is a mistake, you should program to the ISA, it's what it's there for, anything else is OPTIONAL.

Those who think this is just a matter of CFLAGS should have a go at compiling Chromium for the IA32 ISA. Even if Firefox currently still builds, it won't take long for it to head down the same path as Chromium.

[SpyroRyder]

I really have an issue with all these non-portable dependencies on specific extensions of particular ISAs. It's one thing to add accelerated codepaths or better yet call out to external acceleration libraries like liboil, but dropping generic portable code is just wrong. Depending on ISA extensions is a mistake, you should program to the ISA, it's what it's there for, anything else is OPTIONAL.

Those who think this is just a matter of CFLAGS should have a go at compiling Chromium for the IA32 ISA. Even if Firefox currently still builds, it won't take long for it to head down the same path as Chromium.

When the extension set is standard and implemented on every bit of hardware that's younger than 10 years why would it matter? We aren't talking about a calculation program, but a web browser that in a lot of cases of the non-conformant hardware probably couldn't run effectively anyway. And like the guy above says, using "but think of the poor people" doesn't work as an excuse

[Delgarde]

I really have an issue with all these non-portable dependencies on specific extensions of particular ISAs. It's one thing to add accelerated codepaths or better yet call out to external acceleration libraries like liboil, but dropping generic portable code is just wrong. Depending on ISA extensions is a mistake, you should program to the ISA, it's what it's there for, anything else is OPTIONAL.

When an "extension" has been available on all x86 and x86_64 hardware released in the past decade, it doesn't really count as an extension anymore... SSE can legitimately be considered part of the standard these days...

[dungeon]

Drops and improvments,together with occasional pushes... so what is so new or old there?

I think Adobe dropped flash for linux support for CPUs without SSE2 something like 4-5 years ago... use ESR and plan to buy something newer even ultra cheapest low power x86 solutions nowdays are much faster than these dropped fastest Pentium 3 and Athlon XP to not speak of older or slower than top of these

[s_j_newbury]

Drops and improvments,together with occasional pushes... so what is so new or old there?

I think Adobe dropped flash for linux support for CPUs without SSE2 something like 4-5 years ago... use ESR and plan to buy something newer even ultra cheapest low power x86 solutions nowdays are much faster than these dropped fastest Pentium 3 and Athlon XP to not speak of older or slower than top of these

That's an exaggeration. An Athlon XP 3200+ is faster than most low end modern x86 CPUs with the exception of SIMD support, being only 3DNow!/SSE.

[dungeon]

That's an exaggeration. An Athlon XP 3200+ is faster than most low end modern x86 CPUs with the exception of SIMD support, being only 3DNow!/SSE.

Athlon XP 3200+ singlethread rank 660

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?...lon+XP+3200%2B

Slowest 2 core 10 W Goldmont Celeron J3355 shows 880 singlerank

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php....00GHz&id=2960

Cost $54

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16813157726

That would be very worthy upgrade over any Athlon XP or Pentium 3 on any point - performance, power consumpation and of course support Even integrated GPU in that might beat 90% of AGP cards Not to mention you can watch videos with that like a man, etc...

Or better find AMD AM1 Athlons if you want cheap low power but also unprecedent compatablity as that has drivers for anything in range of Windows XP up to Windows 10 and anything in between both 32bit and 64bit or Linux both 64bit or 32bit, both radeon and amdgpu drivers, both fglrx and amdgpu-pro support

I have that, that can run nearly anything Debian Wheezy with 3.2 kernel, Jessie 3.16 also works wit long term 4.9 kernel all with with fglrx 32bit or 64bit without compiling anything or you can roll Sid no problem

In comparison to Athlon XP you can't move nowhere much, with AGP it is really only 32bit Windows XP or some Linux usable

[Zucca]

I'm curious though: Do recent Firefox versions yield acceptable performance on such dated hardware?

Barely works on my Compaq Armada E500 with Pentium III 900MHz and ~380MB of RAM running Alpine Linux. ;P

If I have some spare time in the future I could set up a optimized Gentoo install there (compiling stuff elswere). In fact, back in around 2005 I had Gentoo install on it.