I think we need to admit that there isn't any rational, analytical way to compare most of the costs here. The one number we *do* have, the number of users who can't upgrade, is kind of tantalizing us, but we can't quantify how many users we'll gain by requiring SSE2, how many other bugs we'll fix because engineers don't need to worry about old CPUs, and so on.
When you can't be rational, often the next best thing is to be fair. For example, our choice to support ESRs for a year is a similar arbitrary choice: we don't re-evaluate who will be affected each time an ESR is about to expire. We just announce a policy in advance that is useful to a large number of people, and then follow it. One analogous approach here would be to simply decide not to support CPUs sold new more than N years ago. On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 8:50 AM, Tobias B. Besemer < tobias.bese...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Am Mittwoch, 18. Mai 2016 16:52:25 UTC+2 schrieb Boris Zbarsky: > > On 5/18/16 7:38 AM, Tobias B. Besemer wrote: > > > Is this really a discussion if Firefox should support CPUs older then > 13-15 years ??? > > > > More or less, yes. > > > > > I can't imagine any scenario were a user needs to run a Pentium III > with GUI and a browser on it... > > > > There were AMD CPUs newer than that without SSE2. > > > > But more importantly, we have concrete evidence, via crash-stats, that > > such users exist, in small amounts. So the theoretical "I can't imagine > > why anyone would do it" argument runs into the experimental "these > > people clearly exist" issue. > > > > -Boris > > I wrote 13-15 years, because Intel did it 15 years ago and AMD 13 years > ago. > > Crash-stats with FF >40? > > There was ~1 year ago a request at Avira to support non-SSE2 again with > there scanner again... > AFAIKR I wrote to it, that the user should have a look into BIOS if there > is a SSE2 support that can be turned on, because I can imagine that this > was a long time optional and e.g. after a BIOS-Reset it was turned off... > Think there came never any answer back in the Feedback-Community... > > Is it possible in the stats to see, if the systems _should_ support it? > (E.g. what kind of CPU is used by the system...) > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
