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Mozilla Puts Tiger Out To Pasture
Barence writes "Mozilla is ready to exorcise support for Mac OS X 10.4 from Firefox's development code, closing the door on Apple's aging OS. The foundation stopped supporting 10.4, codenamed Tiger, in September 2009, but, according to Josh Aas, a Mozilla platform engineer, 'we left much of the code required to support that platform in the tree in case we wanted to reverse that decision." We had 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 notes on the Mozilla developer planning forum."
Please no !
There are a lot of old G3 macs around that can run only Tiger and are perfect as a browsing machine (if you don't want to watch flash videos).
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I'm not a Mac person so I don't keep track of every update, but why is it that OSX 10.4, a version which only came out in 2005 according to Wikipedia, has so much code that prevents Mozilla from trivially continuing to maintain compatibility in Firefox? Does it have something to do with the PPC->Intel switch? The fact that they'd drop support for an OS version thats only 5 years old, when Firefox quite obviously still works on 10 year old Windows 2000, is sort of surprising.
This is far too premature. Firefox is still supported on Windows 2000, yet Tiger was still shipping on new Mac less than three years ago. Lots of people are still running this on G3 machines that can't upgrade to Leopard. I think this is just too soon.
I'm surprised that so much version specific code is needed to support a minor release of the OS. Why is that?
We still have a computer running 10.2 hooked up to a microscope. It still works just fine, and I'm hesitant to upgrade without a real good reason. It would be really nice to continue to get updates for Firefox.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's foolish to continue supporting obsolete platforms until the end of time -- Windows developers take notice. Besides, very few people are put out in the cold by this decision -- 10.5 will run on most Macs (with the exception of iBook G3s) from the end of 2002 onward. I think between 5 and 7 years of backward compatibility in hardware is good enough.
Those of you still running Tiger on your G3s will have to switch to Opera 10, and considering how slooooow those ancient machines are with the modern Web you ought to be using Opera anyhow.
A shame. I know people who bought nice new Macbooks running 10.4 in 2008, and they won't want to upgrade their OS after just over a year. I have a 700 mhz ibook that is great to travel with and does everything I want it to, but is slowly becoming insecure because it's gradually becoming unsupported. Yet it runs fine, and I'd cheerfully stick with it if I could.
Buy, buy, buy...what a pain. How hard is it to just keep up on security patches for old browsers?
How hard is it to just keep up on security patches for old browsers?
A security patch isn't as simple as deciding "Oh, we don't want to have that vulnerability any more" and commenting out a setting. If it was that easy, there wouldn't be very many vulnerabilities at all.
On the one hand, any time you find a new vulnerability (or a new class of vulnerabilities), you have to audit all the nooks and crannies of the code base in order to identify either the problem itself, or the problem areas that are affected.
On the other hand, any time you change a line of code, you have to recompile. That means, to release the patch, you'll have to recompile for *every target OS*, and you'll have to *test* on every one of those OSes.
Surely when considering both of those complicating factors, you can see what Mozilla's motivations might be for retiring old support branches with a relatively limited user base?
This is Mozilla pure and simple. Apple offers Safari 4 for OS X 10.4 (Tiger), so it's clearly not an impossible task to have an up to date browser on the OS.
You mean the kind who are shackled to a desk 9-5 with a strict 30 minute lunch break, and get kicks out of really awesome spreadsheets?
You can keep your "real coffee" and your fucking suit, I'll stick to working a job that is flexible around me, not the other way around.
What is...?
It's discussed in the discussion thread also, but it's a matter of what resources it takes to continue support. In the case of Win2K/XP, maintaining compatibility doesn't require nearly the resources that maintaining 10.4 compatibility does. OSX tends to change a LOT between the various 10.x releases, far more than Windows.
Also, it's important to note that this is being discussed for the next major release of Firefox - i.e. 3.7 or whatever they end up calling it. If they hit their targets, that won't be out at the earliest until the end of the year. Adding in security updates, 10.4 users wouldn't be left out in the cold until the middle of 2011 at the earliest. It stands to simple reason that the proportion of 10.4 is only going to continue dropping over the next year and a half. Why should Mozilla continue to devoting limited resources to an OS that requires disproportionate resources to support at that point?
How hard is it to just keep up on security patches for old browsers?
It's not a question of being "hard" or not - maintaining another platform/configuration simply takes time and resources. As I understand, on top of that there was a big deprecation of API calls moving from 10.4, so they also need specialized people that know their way around and systems that have 10.4 installed ready for testing.
When a user reports a problem on 10.4, someone has to spend a day trying to reproduce it and find its way through old code ...
Build breaks because of old forgotten code made for 10.4 ...
At this point it's purely a business decision - keeping support for 10.4 adds the need for X extra developers and delays releases for Y days. Is it worth the cost?