Talking about Firefox, I've recently heard some people getting annoyed that Firefox now depends upon Rust and Rust doesn't build on their obscure legacy platform.

I'm in turn getting annoyed at the complete lack of cost/benefit analysis that this entails.

Every software project has to deal with limited resources and the attitude that the vast majority of people running on more mainstream platforms should forsake improvements (in security or usability by Rust for example) in order to support Solaris, Illumos, HP-UX or any of those niche platforms, well that just pisses me off.

I still have a 32bit Debian installation (originally installed around 2003 and been Ship of Theseus-d over the years so it actually has 64bit hardware now) that I didn't have the time or motivation to upgrade, but if 32bit support would go away tomorrow I'd understand. What's the percentage of 32bit vs 64bit users? 0.3%?

The other way to view this is as rich software developers asking the rest of the world to pay to upgrade their hardware, or else forgo security patches. That may be hard if you're in a poor country, or are otherwise living near the poverty line.

Commercial interests have little incentive to serve this demographic, due to their lack of buying power. That leaves open source projects that were created for the public good.

What happened to Firefox Quantum?

Many things, none of them good if you have 2 Gb of RAM, 2 cores and no graphics acceleration. Chromium works really well in this kind of hardware specially with javascript blocked.

My understanding is that FF Quantum works just fine even on as little as 1GB RAM. (In fact you can make it usable on as little as 512MB, but only with some swap usage.) Chrome/Chromium is a lot more RAM-hungry in my experience.

Huh? I've used Firefox Quantum in a VM with 512mb of RAM, it works acceptably on simple sites.

I remember the glorious days when firefox was not a memoryhog. 700MB for hundreds of tabs. Nowadays it needs 2GB because of the awful multi process model.

At least it's not as bad as Chromium's one, which is unusable on machine with 8GB RAM with hundreds of tabs.

My real usercase experience is not the same. None of the modern web browsers are really usable with 512 mb.

So how is this related to firefox quantum? It was not a "modern web browser" before that?

Note, I meant really simple sites. Stuff like Hacker News, and the basic html version of gmail.