Updated Chromium browser not working

[Darroch]

I've been using the Chromium browser on a very old machine (Athlon XP, 1 GB SDRAM) currently under Linux Mint 17 (Mate). All was well with earlier versions of Chromium and Mint until this evening when the Mint update manager invited me to upgrate my old Chromium application to Chromium 36.0.1985.125-0ubuntu1.14.04.0~pkg1029. I did this and now the new browser won't open. If I run Chromium from a terminal (chromium-browser %U) I get the message "Illegal instruction". If I run Chromium with the debug swith (chromium-browser -g) I get the following:

# Env:
# LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/chromium-browser:/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libs
# PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
# GTK_PATH=
# CHROMIUM_USER_FLAGS=
# CHROMIUM_FLAGS=--disable-new-tab-first-run --enable-user-scripts --enable-pinch
/usr/bin/gdb /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser -x /tmp/chromiumargs.sZLlvB
GNU gdb (Ubuntu 7.7-0ubuntu3.1) 7.7
Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i686-linux-gnu".
Type "show configuration" for configuration details.
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>.
Find the GDB manual and other documentation resources online at:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/documentation/>.
For help, type "help".
Type "apropos word" to search for commands related to "word"...
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
(gdb)


That's it! Anybody else had this problem? Anybody know how to solve it? Although the AthlonXP doesn't have SSE2 I've always been able to run earlier versions of the browser without trouble before. Opera and Firefox both run fine. Any experts out there know how to fix this? Could it be down to a hardware problem? Any help or advice would be very welcome.

Thank you in advance.

[Aristotelian]

I have no idea what is going on for you, but as a next step I would try removing it and then reinstalling through the software manager or synaptic. You might also try deleting your chromium settings in the /.config folder.

[Darroch]

Tried the above and the result is the same. I'm wondering if this version of Chromium has been compiled to use SSE2 which, I am pretty sure, the Google Chrome browser has been. (Pepperflash and flashplayer certainly only work on Linux on machines with CPUs with SSE2.) Has anybody got the latest version of Chromium running on a CPU WITHOUT SSE2? I am wondering if this might be the root cause of my problem.

[Darroch]

After contacting a Chromium developer I can now answer my own question.

Chromium from version 35 onwards will not run on any machine with a non-compliant sse2 processor.

So for those of us with AthlonXP or Pentium III processors without sse2 will not be able to use the newest versions of Chromium.

[robertmf]

linux mint 17/MATE
"cat /proc/cpuinfo" indicates my box has SSE2

For the past year+ chromium-browser has been crap. It's either [waiting for cache] and/or [page not loading]. It was good when the browser first came out. Now, I use seamonkey or the newer Vivaldi browser.