14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is dropping Tiger support altogether, as far as its Firefox web browser is concerned. A post over at mozilla.dev.planning has Mozilla developer Josh Aas laying out the case for dropping support for Apple’s five-year-old OS, explaining that Mozilla needs to start taking advantage of modern features available in Leopard and Snow Leopard, the successors of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
“In September of 2009 we stopped supporting Mac OS X 10.4 (‘Tiger’) on mozilla-central but we left much of the code required to support that platform in the tree in case we wanted to reverse that decision,” Aas writes. “We have come to a point where we need to make a final decision and either restore 10.4 support or remove this (large) amount of 10.4 specific code.”
He adds, “Mac OS X 10.4 was released in April of 2005 and a lot has changed since then. We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X and 10.4 support has been a hindrance. Where we can work around supporting 10.4, doing so consumes valuable time and effort. Neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this.”
The developer goes to dish out a few numbers, revealing that approximately 25% of Mozilla’s Mac OS X users are still on Tiger. They continue to be supported by Firefox 3.6 until that product reaches the end of service, and that is still months away, Aas assures these people. In short, Tiger support will be dropped (if they decide to) only after the next major version of Firefox is released. Aas adds that, by dropping support for Tiger, Mozilla would not lose a considerable market share either, yet does note that Mozilla has always been one of the last third-party software providers to continue supporting older Mac OS X releases.
“Adding 10.4 support back to mozilla-central would mean switching back to ATSUI from Core Text, switching back to gcc-4.0 from gcc-4.2, and doing a bit of porting work for code that has been added to the tree since we dropped support for 10.4,” Aas continues to explain, suggesting it would be a useless drag to continue supporting Tiger, when most customers will be able to run better versions of the browser, these people being Mozilla’s top priority when it comes to Firefox.
Complex text input (IME), out-of-process plugins, printing, native menus, and Core Animation are just more areas where Tiger support consumes Mozilla’s time, makes them error-prone, and/or limits the company’s capabilities, Aas explains. To top it all, “Apple's upcoming JavaPlugin2 will not support Mac OS X 10.4,” the developer reveals. “We are planning to make the decision to remove 10.4 support final and remove the code from the tree. If you have any strong objections please let us know now,” Mozilla’s man concludes.
Softpedia would also like to see what its readers think about this move. Clearly, there are a number of Tiger users out there that won’t be too happy to hear the news, but it’s just how it always goes. Yours truly has a PPC Mac running Tiger at home and, whenever Firefox is running, it works extremely slow. I figured why hope for updates, when this is all this machine can do? We simply need to let go sometimes. Plus, the browser isn’t going anywhere. The current version will always be available for download, and it’s packed full of features already. You can’t ask for more of a machine / OS that can’t deliver, can you?