Re: Firefox 52esr on PPC32 is outdated

Hi Ricardo,

On Thu, 2024-11-14 at 11:25 +0100, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> I don't know which kind of news you expect? did you do anything?

Agreed.

> On my side, ArcticFox, I was able to find out by bisecting (that means 
> about one week of compilation attempts on my PowerBook).
> Built-in ICU broke and build needs to use system ICU. I have now working 
> build again... so a decently usable browser for basic needs.

FWIW, you can get access to to a PowerPC machine running big-endian Linux
either though OpenPOWER at OSUOSL or the GCC Compile Farm. You don't have
to do the bisecting on your old PowerBook ;-).

> Current Firefox has a build fix which I am not able to import yet too 
> divergent code base, maybe in the future.
> 
> On debian there are no issues, I made a binary available.
> 
> I did no work on Firefox, last time it didn't work. Generally on a PPC32 
> system I expect it to be barely usable, even if it had no bugs. On 
> equivalent Intel systems (e.g. a PIII) it is quite slow nowadays, albeit 
> usable for basic needs.
> 
> Trade-off between more usability and more compatibility.

For current Firefox on 32-bit PowerPC, we would need to come up with a way
to cross-transpile the embedded Javascript code in Firefox from x86_64.

Adrian

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