Comment 82 for bug 585940

I would agree that for your average non-technical user, dissuading them from 64-bit is probably a wise decision, and that people "in the know" would probably just download the 64-bit version anyway (as I did).

About the only problem I've been having as a daily annoyance with 64-bit Ubuntu has been the Flash issue. To put it bluntly, nspluginwrapper is evil. I just switched over from an Arch install where I was using the 64-bit Flash plugin (knowing the security risks, but going with it anyway) and it worked reasonably well. Having spent a few weeks with nspluginwrapper on my Ubuntu64 install, I've been going mad trying to deal with wholesale browser slowdowns when opening multiple tabs containing Flash content in both Firefox and Chromium, not to mention the random crashes where the Flash would disappear from the page altogether and require a reload. Mind you, this is not an extraordinary thing. This is something that your average web user does several times a day every day.

How I solved this? Not by switching to a 32-bit Ubuntu, but by doing a dkpg --force-architecture -i of Google's Chrome i386.deb, which I downloaded from Google's Chrome web page. Works flawlessly. Now Flash works as well as it does on Windows (gasp!), actually probably better. No problems with integration, either because the 32-bit Chrome can even be used as my default browser in my 64-bit GNOME desktop, apparently without any problems (so far).

I wonder if this might not be a good suggestion for 10.10, that Ubuntu package 32-bit browsers by default in the 64-bit install. I honestly don't see why a browser would need access to more than 4GB of RAM, and the plus side is you are still running in long mode so you get the extra registers and other advantages of 64-bit as well while running a 32-bit browser.