I don't think you'd want to run the current versions of Firefox on a Pentium III anyway. You'd be better off with something like K-Meleon.

Carlos S. M. wrote:

unlike Chrome (Google Chrome is propietary with many open source parts though)

That's what "Chromium" is for.

Firefox did not seem to run very well on non sse2 processors anyways from my experience. I always got the "running in compatibility mode" message and it was slow as a dog on my dual 1ghz p3

https://github.com/rn10950/RetroZilla/releases
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/26t … rks_of_firefox/

I know this is a retro forum, but protest because firefox (as chrome before) drops support to 15 year old micros... sorry, but to me it's crying for the sake of crying.

Jorpho wrote:

I don't think you'd want to run the current versions of Firefox on a Pentium III anyway. You'd be better off with something like K-Meleon.

Carlos S. M. wrote:

unlike Chrome (Google Chrome is propietary with many open source parts though)

That's what "Chromium" is for.

Well, i managed to get Firefox 48.0.2 working fine on a dual Tualatin server (2x P3 1.4-S GHz) running Windows Server 2003, but the scrooling doesn't look smooth thanks to the crappy onboard S3 video (run just bad as a Pentium 4 with standard video adapter (no video driver) on XP). I still need some futher testing when i got a more cappable videocard for that build. Having tried yet on single CPU P3s

Also not only P3s are affected, also the faster Athlon XPs too which lacks SSE2 (Athlon XP was from Pentium 4 era)

shiva2004 wrote:

I know this is a retro forum, but protest because firefox (as chrome before) drops support to 15 year old micros... sorry, but to me it's crying for the sake of crying.

Well, one of the reasons for the post was the little info about Mozzila dropping non SSE2 CPUs, if you try to find "Firefox SSE2" you'll get mostly links for forums posts from like 2011-2015 about chances of Firefox dropping non SSE2 CPU

Mozilla stated firefox will requier SSE2 starting with 49.0 on the changelog for Firefox 48: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/48.0/releasenotes/

but, i couldn't find directly from google, i went to the 48.0 release notes from this topic: http://portableapps.com/node/54910

Also, i don't know who still uses current releases of Firefox on a non SSE2 CPU of this forum, but i think there at least someone who uses it, who knows. I didn't meant this to be a protest (i know Firefox 49.0+ will stay SSE2 only), but rather some informative post

Also, not all unsupported CPUs are 15 year old, some are newer as 2004 (later Athlon XPs and Socket A Semproms which corresponds to the Pentium 4 era)

Doesn't stop people from compiling themselves.

awgamer wrote:

Doesn't stop people from compiling themselves.

That is true, also that is the reason why there many forks of Firefox as well with more features or optimized builds of Firefox since is open source

I once heard that the official win32 binary was/is compiled on a Win2000 machine and that they face(d) serious issues with the limited amout of memory.
Perhaps, this is another reason to remove unecessary/deprecated features ?
I guess the non-SSE stuff isn't in the source code, but perhaps the alternate code paths do take up some memory during compilation.
Anyway, my information is several years old now and I'm surprised as to why they do still support 32Bit Windows. 😮
I thhought most PCs are now 64Bit, XP reached its end-of-life and the main reason for 32Bit Firefox was support for x86 plugins, like Flash or Silverlight (which they want to get rid of).

Jo22 wrote:

I thhought most PCs are now 64Bit, XP reached its end-of-life and the main reason for 32Bit Firefox was support for x86 plugins, like Flash or Silverlight (which they want to get rid of).

And so they'll probably keep supporting 32-bit Firefox until Flash gets stamped out once and for all. That still probably won't happen for a few years yet, I reckon.

Jorpho wrote:

Jo22 wrote:

I thhought most PCs are now 64Bit, XP reached its end-of-life and the main reason for 32Bit Firefox was support for x86 plugins, like Flash or Silverlight (which they want to get rid of).

And so they'll probably keep supporting 32-bit Firefox until Flash gets stamped out once and for all. That still probably won't happen for a few years yet, I reckon.

I think the same. Don't get me wrong folks, I still like XP or 98SE+KernelEX and Firefox 32Bit is nice to have, but I wished they would spend that energy for a proper 64Bit build :
Web pages have steadily increased in complexity in the last few years (lots of scripting going on behind the scene), thus requiring lots of memory even though
they look kinda bald now (modern sytle)..

I mean, there are still other Firefox forks out there with support for older systems. Like Pale Moon, for example.
Yes, it did drop XP support already, but still has a special Intel Atom and Windows XP build available.
It only requires 256 MB of free RAM, Windows XP SP3/Server 2003 or later and a processor with SSE2 capabilities (what a coincidence!) 😉

And regarding Flash.. I don't know. I've got mixed feelings about it. I mean, I know it is dated and a relic of the past.
But on the other hand, it also offered a consistent interface and looked equal on all computers. Sure, it is bad for Android and smartphones in general
(focus is on the mouse pointer), but it also has been a nice animation tool and good for browser games. Perhaps it will survive as a gaming platform..

I don't know about win32 version but running Firefox 50 on a Barton on Ubuntu. Ok that the speed sometimes is quiet good, sometimes pages are just too complex and need to wait a bit during scroling. But with opengl composition it's not so bad.