Nah mate, something doesn't add up. I can't buy this. Even the cheapest Atoms had 64bit support much earlier than that and Atoms were lower tier silicone than Celeron so you can't tell me Intel had brand new 32 bit only Celerons in 2019.
My Google-fu found the last 32-bit only chips intel shipped were the Intel Quark embedded SoCs EoL in 2015. So what you're saying doesn't pass the smell test.
Mate, 20 year old system means a Pentium 4 Prescott and Athlon 64, both of which had 64 bit support. And in another year after we already had dual core 64 bit CPUs.
So if you're stuck on 32 bit CPUs then your system is even older than 20 years.
So you could very well have bought a decent quality 32 bit system after 2005, although the writing was on the wall long before then.
Not really. With the launch of Athlon 64, AMD basically replaced all their 32bit CPUs lineups with that new arch, and not kept them along much longer as a lower tier part. By 2005 I expect 90% of new PCs sold were already 64 bit ready.
These things that look like institutions, that look like bricks carved from granite, are just spinning plates that have been spinning for a few years.
When I fight glibc dependency hell across Ubuntu 22 and Ubuntu 24, I sympathize with Firefox choosing to spin the 64-bit plates and not the 32-bit plates.
Employees: “We want to use new feature X.”
Boss: “Sorry, but that isn’t available for our wealthy customers who are stuck on Eee PCs.”
Nah.
They will be in dire straights if the Google money goes away for some reason, but right now they have plenty of money.
(not that I think it makes any sense for them to maintain support for 32-bit cpus)
Last i checked, Mozilla was an ad company with Google as the main "donor".