14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas has opened a discussion with fellow developers this week proposing to drop support of the Firefox web browser for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple’s aging desktop operating system.
Aas believes six more months of support should be enough for Leopard users who will account for roughly 13% of Mac OS X users across all versions of the web browser when Firefox 13 ships.
His argument seems solid. Aas says “Apple releases new versions of its operating systems relatively quickly and each new version contains significant changes that we must adapt to. This requires resources, and with limited resources this sometimes means we have to make tough decisions about where to invest.”
He believes that continued development for the OS X 10.5 platform will drain “a non-trivial portion of the resources [they] have available for Mac OS X development [overall]”.
By deduction, not maintaining Leopard will allow Firefox engineers to deploy more resources in Firefox for newer versions of OS X.
That’s not all, though. Firefox is also short of a few features on Leopard, such as ccelerated compositing and WebGL. “Users cannot run plugins out-of-process on Mac OS X 10.5,” Aas explains.
“Finally, Apple has stopped supporting Mac OS X 10.5,” Aas continues. “While they do not officially drop support for older OS versions, they have stopped shipping security updates and updating applications like Safari.”
The engineering manager makes a good point, though I’m sure that many of the Leopard users out there relying on Firefox for their daily web browsing sessions may not agree.
Also, the move may take longer than six months to come to terms with Josh's proposal, but they'll get there in the next year or so.
This is not the first time Firefox pulls the plug on development for older platforms, and it’s not going to be the last either. In the meanwhile, you can still grab the latest Leopard-supported Firefox (as well as for newer OS X versions) via the link below.