Investigate broken Chromium/Firefox on latest Raspberry Pi OS

[PeterJCLaw]

While updating our Pi 1Bs (specifically they're labelled "2011.12") to the 2022-01-28 release of Raspberry Pi OS we found that neither Firefox nor Chromium.

For context: we weren't using the 2022-04-04 image as it was a) too big for the 4G SD cards we have and b) requires interactive setup we haven't yet worked around (see https://github.com/PeterJCLaw/srcomp-kiosk/issues/9).

Our initial investigation (of Firefox) was of the "Illegal instruction" error that that yields, leading to https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=263051; though while that thread seems to conclude correctly that the architecture was the issue there isn't a resolution. None of the alternative browsers proved suitable (we tried those at https://www.fossmint.com/web-browsers-for-raspberry-pi/).

However it looks like the issue is that Raspberry Pi OS has moved to third party builds of Chromium & Firefox which no longer support the older Pis:

• https://github.com/RPi-Distro/chromium-browser/issues/25
• https://github.com/RPi-Distro/chromium-browser/issues/21

Surprisingly the error we got from Chromium wasn't the Illegal instruction error that those issues noted:

[0418/212042.610185:ERROR:elf_dynamic_array_reader.h(61)] tag not found
Trace/breakpoint trap

TODO:

• [ ] check more recent builds of Chromium (from the repos) in case they're fixed
• [ ] epiphany-browser (though I've a vague recollection that that didn't work for us previously)

[PeterJCLaw]

cc @sedders123

[AnilGupte]

Chromium appears to be broken on ARMv7 as well. See this thread: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=349522&sid=c5ddbea73600ce539308fa5e89243a23

Or is it only in the context of RealVNC? I don't have the ability to test without the latter.