Firefox 53 Beta Drops Pre-P4/Opteron On Linux, New Compact Themes

[notaz]

As far as dropping stuff goes, bigger one was to drop plain alsa support in official FF52 builds and require pulse, which I never needed on my machine up until now. I chose to move to Chromium instead, at least for now. Forcing people to use certain software like that is not nice, especially when they still carry alsa support in the code, just not compiling it...

[bibaheu]

RIP my Pentium 3 laptop lol. For reals Firefox is the only browser that (kinda) works in that thing, Chrome just dies with "illegal instruction", same with anything using Qt. Still, randomly Firefox would die too with illegal instruction, I guess when trying to use SSE2.

I use that as server and when I need to be distraction free while writing, so not having a browser it's not the end of the world.

[89c51]

Firefox releases are so boring. Nothing worthy on the linux side most of the time :/

[Chewi]

As far as dropping stuff goes, bigger one was to drop plain alsa support in official FF52 builds and require pulse, which I never needed on my machine up until now. I chose to move to Chromium instead, at least for now. Forcing people to use certain software like that is not nice, especially when they still carry alsa support in the code, just not compiling it...

So install apulse.

[microcode]

RIP my Pentium 3 laptop lol. For reals Firefox is the only browser that (kinda) works in that thing, Chrome just dies with "illegal instruction", same with anything using Qt. Still, randomly Firefox would die too with illegal instruction, I guess when trying to use SSE2.

I use that as server and when I need to be distraction free while writing, so not having a browser it's not the end of the world.

You can still use Firefox ESR on your P3 for a while. Firefox 52 is, conveniently, an ESR release.

[Gusar]

Firefox can still be compiled with alsa, even the nightlies, and there's no immediate plans to actually drop alsa support, it's just the official Mozilla provided binaries that require pulseaudio. So lobby your distro maintainers to build Firefox with alsa support, or compile it yourself.

Then there's apulse. Though I kinda have the feeling that at some point apulse will go so far in its attempt to have it work with various pulse-demanding apps that it'll end up re-implementing all of pulseaudio anyway :P

[ua=42]

RIP my Pentium 3 laptop lol. For reals Firefox is the only browser that (kinda) works in that thing, Chrome just dies with "illegal instruction", same with anything using Qt. Still, randomly Firefox would die too with illegal instruction, I guess when trying to use SSE2.

I use that as server and when I need to be distraction free while writing, so not having a browser it's not the end of the world.

....
Seriously, you can buy a $100 arm laptop running linux...
Or spend $250 and have an x64 quad linux laptop. https://litebook.store/

[Shimon]

Still, randomly Firefox would die too with illegal instruction, I guess when trying to use SSE2.

Firefox works fine (check out Porteus 3.2 which is based on Slackware 14.2) but you have to disable the Flash plugin which definitely needs SSE2 and will happily crash the browser.

[chithanh]

Chrome just dies with "illegal instruction", same with anything using Qt. Still, randomly Firefox would die too with illegal instruction, I guess when trying to use SSE2.

Just get Chromium/Firefox from a distro that builds 32 bit binaries without SSE2 (Ubuntu should work). Do not download binaries from Mozilla or Google, those won't work any more.

Flash plugin is a problem, but you can install older flash versions (up to 11.2.202.235 works on non-SSE2 systems). Due to known security vulnerabilities in old versions of Flash, use it only to display trusted content.

[nanonyme]

Just get Chromium/Firefox from a distro that builds 32 bit binaries without SSE2 (Ubuntu should work). Do not download binaries from Mozilla or Google, those won't work any more.

Flash plugin is a problem, but you can install older flash versions (up to 11.2.202.235 works on non-SSE2 systems). Due to known security vulnerabilities in old versions of Flash, use it only to display trusted content.

In other words, don't use old Flash versions against content from the Internet