Chrome to require SSE3.

[Xack]

Chrome is upping the cpu requirements again for Chrome 89 meaning that many older Windows 7 computers will be affected. Firefox will probably follow suit as well soon meaning older computers will need New Moon’s non sse builds. Since SSE3 is defacto required by Windows 8 anyway this means that a portion of Windows 7 users get dropped before the official dropping of 7 support by Chrome.

I feel it is a bad idea dropping cpus during the current cpu shortage.

[DanR20]

With Mozilla bleeding firefox users can’t seem them doing it. They probably will eventually, just not right away. But then you never know, going from the old legacy system to quantum cost them millions of users and it didn’t seem to phase them. So I do hope they wait until at least after the next esr version to keep the newer FF useable on the old Win7 boxes until it’s dropped completely.

[MrMADRYAN]

@Xack, I don't agree. SSE3 requirement means that computers older than year 2005 will not get Google Chrome update. People should stop using such old PCs. Sometimes, when I see people complaining about software or hardware support limitation or full discontinuation, it makes me think that some people still use windows 2000 or earlier. Please do not.

[DanR20]

2 minutes ago, MrMADRYAN said:

@Xack, I don't agree. SSE3 requirement means that computers older than year 2005 will not get Google Chrome update. People should stop using such old PCs. Sometimes, when I see people complaining about software or hardware support limitation or full discontinuation, it makes me think that some people still use windows 2000 or earlier. Please do not.

A counterargument to that is there are many poorer countries like China and India where the people simply can't afford newer boxes. They're going to use what they got regardless and so it does everyone a great service to at least provide them with a working browser with some security protections.

Now I get that browser developers can't do this forever but Goggle has the money, although they do what they feel like because they have the power. This is where Roytam and others deserve a good deal of credit for keeping the older versions of Firefox patched and up to date as best they can since for these users it's better than nothing. And the side benefit is that the rest of us get to keep using them as well.

[Vistapocalypse]

11 hours ago, Xack said:

...Firefox will probably follow suit as well soon meaning older computers will need New Moon’s non sse builds...

No, those builds are only needed by computers that don’t even support SSE2, which is only a fraction of the remaining Windows XP diehards. I think browsers that support SSE2 will be around for a long time - they just won’t be based on the latest Chromium.

[blackwire]

One of the many reasons why having a chrome based browser monopoly is bad. Feels like we are back in the bad old ie6 days.

[MrMADRYAN]

@blackwire, I can agree. Since Apple Corp. discontinued Safari for Windows in 2012 I lost my favorite browser. It was WebKit, and I don't have or use any Mac's to use it now. And now any browser is on Blink (Blink is an engine for Chromium). Look at the browser list: Safari is dead, MS IE is dead, Edge is Blink, Brave is Blink, Google Chrome is Blink, Opera is Blink, Yandex.Browser (a browser that is very popular in Russia) is also Blink. Yes, we have FireFox, but personally I dislike FireFox. That is like mobile OS's - Windows Phone is dead, Java is dead, Symbian is dead - we are forced to choose from an iOS or Android. But I hate both of 'em!

Edited February 11, 2021 by MrMADRYAN

[FantasyAcquiesce]

It's sad to see legacy support dropped yet again for legacy hardware. Although I agree PC's older than 2005 are pretty slow, cutting them off will make it hard for those who can't afford new PCs...

[DanR20]

4 hours ago, FantasyAcquiesce said:

It's sad to see legacy support dropped yet again for legacy hardware. Although I agree PC's older than 2005 are pretty slow, cutting them off will make it hard for those who can't afford new PCs...

Considering a backup pre-Prescott Pentium 4 that I own is pretty old (2004 model) except for a few selected sites like youtube's new layout it hums along pretty good. And even youtube isn't that bad. In fact I just picked up a used motherboard for it since Win7 still has several more years of life left.

Do agree though, it's shame to cut those off, millions of people are probably on them as their main box and will be for quite a while yet.

Edited February 15, 2021 by DanR20

[Gansangriff]

95% of the websites will still work with another browser, or the older version of Chrome. Of course the big websites are the incompatible ones. But anyways, they've grown too much to be useable on such old hardware. I'm always surprised how well this bulky Pentium 3 of 2001 performs online, although the single-core is bad at doing things simultaneosly. The hardware without SSE3 deserves respect!

The Pale Moon forks might jump in the place of the best option for older processors. Just as they are now for Windows XP and NoSSE-Processors, like a Celeron from 1998. Pale Moon also has it's own browser engine.

[Mr.Scienceman2000]

On 2/9/2021 at 8:47 PM, MrMADRYAN said:

@Xack I don't agree. SSE3 requirement means that computers older than year 2005 will not get Google Chrome update. People should stop using such old PCs.

I disagree with this one. I got athlon64 that lacks sse3 but does very decently as guest pc with windows 7. Modern sites produce no issues with it (expect new youtube layout).

 

On 2/9/2021 at 8:47 PM, MrMADRYAN said:

@Xack Sometimes, when I see people complaining about software or hardware support limitation or full discontinuation, it makes me think that some people still use windows 2000 or earlier. Please do not.

Some peoples even use win95 today and I see no problem on that.

 

[athlonxpuser]

On 2/15/2021 at 9:10 AM, Gansangriff said:

I'm always surprised how well this bulky Pentium 3 of 2001 performs online, although the single-core is bad at doing things simultaneosly. The hardware without SSE3 deserves respect!

Which browser do you use to go online on a pentium 3? I feel like new moon 27, serpent, etc are so slow on a pentium 3 that they are almost unusable and even basic sites like google take forever to load.

[Gansangriff]

@athlonxpuser Okay, the setup around the browser is very important for its performance (a long description of that will follow now. The image here in the post shows an idling New Moon 27.9.7). This is a 20-year-old Pentium 3 with 1 GHz running with Windows XP with upgraded 512 MB RAM and a single 31 GB IDE hard drive. The mainboard is inside a Compaq Deskpro EN and it's quite large. This evolution of the Pentium 3 supports SSE (that's important for the choice of browser). The graphics card is a bit newer, it's a AGP Radeon 9600 with 128 MB.Actually I was using New Moon 27.9.7 until now, but it wasn't possible to write comments here on MSFN! So I've upgraded to New Moon 28.10.3, 32-Bit. Looks perfect, may consume a little more RAM, but not much. Of course this hasn't the speed of a new computer, so it depends on your expectations. The task manager shows, that the single core runs to 100% CPU usage, when opening a website is requested. But quickly, it calms down, when the task is done. Opening the main page of the MSFN forum (with JavaScript enabled) makes the P3 processor use all its power (100% CPU usage) for 14 seconds, as it's quite a big website. You can reduce the "felt" waiting time by listening to music with an efficent music program, by reading some other page, by drinking your tea, or by writing your next forum post in advance in an efficent text editor. Just some suggestions to make the computer feel quicker!
What else... It's important to use addons that block JavaScript per website, because these scripts drain a lot of power (and do absolutely nothing in your favor in 80% of the cases). I use the old NoScript V5 for that task since years. The fantastic K-Meleon browser had this important functionality on the F7-key. Also when it comes to Windows XP, this can be optimised a lot through "msconfig". Half of the services can be deactivated. I've also killed Microsoft server access with my firewall in my router (Windows XP is a bit chatty). My castle, my rules. No updates, they slow the computer down in my opinion.
I must say, that all that makes the old Pentium 3 useable on the internet, but it's a well performing P3 package, too. The older ones, like the 750 MHz from the year before, weren't that fast. Still, if you'd use that one with Windows 98 and with a TLS 1.2 patched Netscape or K-Meleon, everything these 10 year old browsers can load, they will load quickly!

So all the people with low-end Windows 7 machines from 2004-2005 without SSE3 should have browsers to use, if their operating systems are running well. If the P3 can do the current web, your processor should be capable too! Although with such old hardware, it's better not to rely on big companies websites, because they will ditch you sooner or later... because of money, you know!

Edited February 17, 2021 by Gansangriff
Formatting

[athlonxpuser]

Thanks for your detailed description! Well my P3 system is a dual socket 370 system with 2x 1 GHz Coppermine cpus, 2 GB of SD-RAM and a Radeon HD4670 graphics card. The bottleneck here is definitely the cpus since they are at 100% usage all the time when loading web sites. Currently I use Serpent/Basilisk which I guess should be the same as New Moon 28, just with a different design. I already have NoScript installed and don't allow any scripts whenever it's possible but many sites still take a long time to load, especially bigger sites with a lot of content. But maybe my expectations are just too high and I should stop thinking about a time (until around 2012) where even an old single core could still browse the web smoothly and could handle youtube playback etc. I feel like the fastest browser on this old machine is still Chrome 34 which is the last version that doesn't require a CPU with SSE2 but unfortunately it's from 2014 so it's quite outdated at this point and fails to load some web sites already.

[Mathwiz]

On 2/15/2021 at 2:10 AM, Gansangriff said:

95% of the websites will still work with another browser, or the older version of Chrome.

Yes, for a while. But surely you can see Google's long-term plans: More & more Web sites will require a post-SSE3 version of Chrome (or Firefox, as long as Mozilla cooperates) to decipher Google's latest Googlisms; therefore, older machines will become increasingly useless for browsing the Web.

It probably won't even take them very long. I'm really starting to hate "Monopoly!"