[szbalint]

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%?

[Wowfunhappy]

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.