firefox on i386?

[Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Hi,

am I just weird for trying to get firefox to run on NetBSD/i386?
Even though it's not fast, I still have a Lenovo T60 with a nice
1400x1050 screen, upgraded to 4G physical memory (3G detected by
i386), and CPU-upgraded to a T7400.

However, after upgrading to 10.0_RC1 (which had its own fair bit
of hurdles), upgrading pkgsrc so that firefox is installed
reveals one problem with version 117, in addition to the various
frightening-looking EGL failures, I'm met with

console.error: "Translations: SIMD not supported"

which appears to be a fatal error, and comes from

work/firefox-120.0/toolkit/components/translations/content/simd-detect-worker.js

(This one was self-built, but firefox 117 wasn't much better, and
if memory serves, had the same problem.)

How to deal with that I have no idea.  Binary code in a source
file?!?  And why does it claim my CPU doesn't support SIMD?
After all, it does have MMX, SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 support...

Trying to downgrade to firefox 114 (from 9.0_2023Q2) reveals a
different problem, which ends in a core dump.  Running firefox
from within gdb gives me:

=> 0xb0be012b:    movdqa %xmm7,(%esp)

and %esp:

esp            0xa40f1bbc          0xa40f1bbc

which is neither 8- nor 16-byte aligned, and movdqa insists on
aligned arguments.

Grep'ing the source for movdqa reveals lots of places it's used,
among them  media/libjpeg/simd, media/libyuv, media/ffvpx,
media/libvpx, security/nss in addition to a few others.

So...  This appears to be an uphill battle.  Has everyone else
abandoned i386 support?

Anyone have any good concrete suggestions?

Regards,

- Håvard