Yeah consumer CPUs have been 64-bit since what, the PowerPC G5 (2003), Athlon 64 (2003), and Core 2 (2006)? There were a few 32-bit x86 CPUs that were released afterward, but they were things like Atoms which were quite weak even for the time and would be practically useless on the modern internet.

More generally I feel that Core 2 serves as a pretty good line in the sand across the board. It’s not too hard to make machines of that vintage useful, but becomes progressively challenging with anything older.

I mentioned elswewhere, but Apple started selling 32 bit Core (not Core 2) MacBook Pros in 2006. Those seemed dated even at the time. I’d call them basically the last of the 32 bit premium computers from a major vendor.

Frankly, anything older than that sucks so much power per unit of work that I wouldn’t want to use them for anything other than a space heater.

Intel Prescott, so like 2004.

For what it's worth, people may have been running 64-bit CPUs, but many were still on 32-bit OSes. I was on 32-bit XP until I upgraded to 64-bit Win7.

I have to imagine that group to be pretty small by now, though. Most PCs with specs good enough to still be useful now run W7 64-bit about as well as they do XP SP3 (an old C2D box of mine feels great under 7, as an anecdote), and for those who’ve been running Linux on these boxes there’s not really much reason to go for a 32-bit build over a 64-bit one.

You forgot to mention RAM. Old PCs have often <=4GB RAM and 32-bit browsers use less RAM: https://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/03/32-bit-vs-64-bit-browsers-...

I haven’t tried it, but as bloated as the web is, I don’t think it’s so bad that you need gigabytes of memory or a blazing fast CPU to e.g. read a news website.

As long as you don’t open a million tabs and aren’t expecting to edit complex Figma projects, I’d expect browsing the web with a Pentium + a lightweight distro to be mostly fine.

Idk, I think this is sad. Reviving old hardware has long been one thing Linux is really great at.

Try it and come back to let us know. The modern web is incredibly heavy. Videos everywhere, tons of JavaScript, etc.

My wife had an HP Stream thing with an Intel N3060 CPU and 4GB of RAM. I warned her but it was cheap enough it almost got the job done.

Gmail's web interface would take almost a minute to load. It uses about 500MB of RAM by itself running Chrome.

Does browsing the web include checking your email? Not if you need web mail, apparently.

Check out the memory usage for yourself one of these days on the things you use daily. Could you still do them?

A lightweight Linux desktop still works fine for very basic tasks with 4GB RAM, and that's without even setting up compressed RAM swap. The older 2GB netbooks and tablets might be at the end of the road, though.

I don’t think web browsing is a very basic task anymore, though. A substantial portion of new sites are React SPAs with a lot of client processing demands.

The other issue AIUI and a more pressing one, is that the browser itself is getting a lot heavier wrt. RAM usage, even when simply showing a blank page. That's what ends up being limiting for very-low-RAM setups.

Chromium has a --light switch. And, for the rest, git-clone gopher://bitreich.org/privacy-haters, look up the Unix script for Chrome variables and copy the --arguments stuff for the Chromium launcher under Wndows. Add UBock origin too.

4GB of RAM should be more than enough.

What is this --light switch? I cannot see it at https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

Huh. The reason I'm surprised is that I'm able to comfortably browse the web in virtual machines with only 1 cpu core and 2 gb of memory, even when the VM is simultaneously compiling software. This is only opening 1-2 tabs at a time, mind you.

Why use bloated Chrome? There are much more lightweight web browsers, like Pale Moon, K-Meleon, Otter Browser or Waterfox.

At the time, Chrome was actually a lot faster than Firefox at loading the Gmail web interface. Firefox was also faster than Firefox ESR. I've noticed on lower end hardware that newer is often better with browsers, which is not what I would have expected.

Pale Moon and K-Meleon are really just using an old Gecko engine fork, aren't they? I think Waterfox is the same.

Otter Browser is using QtWebEngine, which is Blink, so it's Chromium with a different UI.

At this point, as far as I can tell, if it successfully renders the modern web, it's a Firefox or Chrome fork anyway. None of the lightweight browsers ever seem to improve my life any.

Compare RAM usage of Pale Moon or K-Meleon with Chrome. This is important for old PCs with 2-4GB RAM. Also Otter Browser is based on QtWebKit-ng.

I have a ThinkPad X1 Gen3 Tablet (20KK) here for my Windows needs, my daily driver is a M2 MBA, and my work machine is a 2019 16-inch MBP (although admitted, that beast got an i9...).

Got the Thinkpad for half the ebay value on a hamfest. Made in 2018-ish, i5-8350U CPU... It's a nice thing, the form factor is awesome and so is the built-in LTE modem. The problem is, more than a dozen Chrome tabs and it slows to a crawl. Even the prior work machine, a 2015 MBP, performed better.

And yes you absolutely need a beefy CPU for a news site. Just look at Süddeutsche Zeitung, a reputable newspaper. 178 requests, 1.9 MB, 33 seconds load time. And almost all of that crap is some sort of advertising - and that despite me being an actually subscribed customer with adblock enabled on top of that.

- Install chromium

- Ublock origin instead of AdBlock

- git clone git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters

  - either copy the chromium file to /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh under GNU/Linux/BSD and chmod +x it, or copy the --arguments array to the desktop launcher path under Windows, such as C:\foo\bar\chrome.exe" --huge-ass-list-of-arguments-copied-there. 

Altough this is HN; so I would just suggest disabling JS under the UBo settings and enabling the advanced settings under Ubo. Now, click on the UBo origin and mark the 3rd party scripts and such in red; and leave out the 1st party images/requests and enabled. Then, starting accepting newspapers' domains and CDN's until it works. The CPU usage will plummet down.

Who uses RAM-eating Chrome on an old computer? There are many lightweight alternatives: K-Meleon, Otter Browser, Pale Moon, Waterfox.

32 bit Atom netbook. I use offpunk, gopher://magical.fish among tons of services (and HN work straight there) and gemini://gemi.dev over the gemini protocol with Telescope as the client. Mpv+yt-dlp+streamlink complement the video support. Miserable?

Go try browsing the web without UBlock Origin today under an i3.