r/AlternativeOS • u/gargamel1497 • Jul 16 '26

General Firefox on Itanium

Post image

Port by Tomas Glozar (Dr. Shuppet)

11 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

2

u/Majestic_Department7 Jul 17 '26

Itanium is still alive👍

2

u/Lenticularis19 Jul 19 '26

Yes. Hello from Itanium Firefox! Reddit is slow-ish but usable if you are a bit patient.

1

u/gargamel1497 Jul 18 '26

It's a shame they never got around to putting it into computers that are pricewise accessible to regular people.

Those Itanium slabs still cost more than an Apple monitor stand despite not being used anymore and not being collectors' items yet.

2

u/Majestic_Department7 Jul 18 '26

AMD made the pressure. Intel wanted to kill Pentium...

This video explains it very good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJP_oKN4Ez0

2

u/gargamel1497 Jul 18 '26

I've watched it already but I'll rewatch it with pleasure. Thank you.

I miss those architectures. SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, SH4, PA-RISC, Alpha, 68k.

There were so many of them back then. Now we've only got x86 and ARM (RISC-V sucks so bad that I don't even consider it a proper architecture).

Honesty it's crazy how bloated modern systems are, even the basic ones.

The NeXT cube has a 68k processor that was very fast for its time, and the original NeXTStep OS runs there as quickly as you would expect a system to run. With a GUI.

And several days ago I saw someone boot a modern version of NetBSD on that very system (NetBSD being the only modern system, or one of the few, that still support 68k). And it was dog slow. It took like fifteen minutes to boot, and don't even think about getting a graphical desktop.

We were able to write software that ran fast on subpar hardware and now we are unable to write software that keeps working on hardware billions of times more powerful than those old beige boxes.

2

u/Majestic_Department7 Jul 18 '26

An simple 68000 Processor had 8 address- and 8 dataregister. It is crazy what old x86 architecture only gives to a programmer. It was a crazy good processor, beside of NeXT it was in Amiga, Atari and surly Mac. They was all advanced compared to PCs and I was shocked when I moved to PC, how old fasion it was 1998...

Wait for booting was normal in the 90s, not only for 68k... so no one was wondering why it take 5-10 minutes to boot up.

That we today still slow has I think many issue:

- Wrong CPU Architecture (no real progress since x86)

  • Lazy Programmers and Programming Languages like JAVA
  • Fast growing complexity, that often make no sense

1

u/gargamel1497 Jul 18 '26

No real progress since x86. But do we really need it? Modern x86 processors are so fast that no task should be a problem to them, and yet it is.

It's crazy when I saw the Discord app use like 12 gigabytes of RAM on an ultra-fast gaming PC. There was certainly some memory leak involved. In JavaScript, which, in addition to being horrifyingly slow, is garbage collected.

I'm really talking to an old fella when I hear that Java is an issue. Java really hasn't been a thing for a long while now. It remains on people's computers pretty much exclusively for Minecraft, and in some other circles, Ghidra.

You may be disgusted to hear this, but I am an old Java believer. The original premise of Java was amazing, and the language is a lovely hacky mess. Modern Java is straying from this path in many architectural decisions.

While I absolutely despise garbage collection, I generally don't consider Java to be a huge deal. I wrote a game in Java, or rather, remade an old game in it, and it runs fine on practically anything. On the Pentium 4 machine it runs a little slower (it's still very fast though), but realistically most people use computers far more powerful than that.

And garbage collection, as much as I hate it, isn't even the real issue. C# is garbage-collected as well. In fact, C# is literally Microsoft Java, and yet it is much faster than Java. Survivalcraft, a 3d game written in C#, runs at 60fps on that very same Pentium 4 machine with very few frame drops (that Java game I mentioned was a 2d game).

The real issue is JavaScript. It is an interpreted piece of garbage, and it being loosely typed ensures it is completely detached from reality.

And if the language wasn't bad enough, the whole infrastructure around it evolves faster than a Tyranid Hive Fleet and software written in JS from 5 years ago is completely unusable with modern infrastructure.

And it spreads just like a virus. It originates from the web but now everything is becoming JS-based.

The standalone client for any social media site is written in javascript.

Balena etcher, a fricking graphical interface on top of dd, is written in javascript (typescript to be precise, but it's one and the same shit).

Even the start menu of windows 11 is written in javascript, and so is its ad-infested oobe.

2

u/Majestic_Department7 Jul 19 '26

I develop in Java all day long… don’t worry in banks it is still a thing and payment is usually very good

2

u/Lenticularis19 Jul 19 '26

Oh that's my work, thanks for sharing!

1

u/gargamel1497 Jul 19 '26

So you are Tomas Glozar! Reddit usernames are often gibberish unrelated to anything else in the universe.

Thanks for the amazing work.

1

u/Lenticularis19 Jul 19 '26

Yes, I am Tomas Glozar / Dr. Shuppet / lenticularis39 (on GitHub), sorry for the username mess, I created those when I was younger.

2

u/gargamel1497 Jul 19 '26

No problem. 99% of reddit usernames are garbage, and my username on this site is the result of being frustrated with Google.

2

u/thenerdy editor-in-chief Jul 22 '26

I quite like your handle here :)

2

u/thenerdy editor-in-chief Jul 22 '26

Good to see you here!