[padenot]

Debian has stopped supporting x86 32bits recently, Chrome did so 9 years or so ago.

We've carefully ran some numbers before doing this, and this affects a few hundreds to a few thousand people (hard to say, ballpark), and most of those people are on 64bits CPUs, but are using a 32bits Firefox or 32bits userspace.

The comparatively high ratio of 32bits users on Windows is not naively applicable to the Linux Desktop population, that has migrated ages ago.

[xorcist]

To expand a bit on that, the i386 support that was recently deprecated to "partially supported" in Debian refers to project status. Unsupported architecture can not be considered blockers, for example. The packages are still being built, are published on the mirrors, and will be for the forseeable future as long as enough people care to keep it alive.

That's the specific meaning of support that it was my intention to point out. Free software projects usually do not "support" software in the commercial sense, but consider platforms supported when there are enough persons to keep the build alive and up to date with the changing build requirements etc. It was my expectation that Firefox was more like free software project than a commercial product, but perhaps that is not the case?

Commercial products have to care about not spreading their resources thin, but for open source cause and effect are the other way around: The resources available is usually the incoming paramter that decides what is possible to support. Hence my surprise that not enough people are willing to support a platform that has thousands of users and isn't particularly exotic, especially compared to what mainstream distributions like Debian already build.

[anthk]

GNUinos and any Devuan based distro still supports 32 bits.