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."

Comments

Nooo !

[psergiu]

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).

Re:Nooo !

[Blakey Rat]

More to the point, what the hell gigantic change could Apple have possibly made to 10.5 to make 10.4 support some kind of giant anchor weighing everything down? Seriously?

Either:
1) Someone's exaggerating and the 10.4 code is actually very small, or
2) That's a gigantic WTF from Apple and they should be called on it.

Normally I'd get pissy over removing support for something that's not really that old, but I guess Mac users are used to that and don't care... so... bully for Mozilla.

Re:Nooo !

[mini me]

Leopard added a slew of new libraries and API improvements. Presumably Mozilla, up until Leopard, were implementing those features internally. Moving forward, Mozilla can now rely on Apple to do the work in these areas except when they want to run on earlier versions of OS X (i.e. Tiger).

The question here is, should Mozilla continue to duplicate the efforts of Apple to provide compatibility with people running older systems?

Re:Nooo !

[palegray.net]

I'm a huge Mac fan, but you could always just install Linux on that G3 to give it a new lease on life, with the added benefit of more modern software.

Re:Nooo !

[bheer]

Here's a taste of the changes between Tiger and Leopard/Snow Leopard. Even though Leopard->Snow Leopard was (relatively) incremental stabilization and refinement, remember that Leopard was a *big* upgrade.

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. Other areas where 10.4 support consumes our time, makes our code more complex or error-prone, and/or limits our capabilities include complex text input (IME), out-of-process plugins, printing, native menus, and Core Animation. Furthermore, Apple's upcoming JavaPlugin2 will not support Mac OS X 10.4.

Re:Nooo !

[Blakey Rat]

The question here is, should Mozilla continue to duplicate the efforts of Apple to provide compatibility with people running older systems?

The answer is: Mozilla should have a very clear policy about backwards compatibility and follow it to the letter. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't currently have that.

Barring that, the answer should be: Until Apple actively does something to break the older "deprecated" code in Firefox, they should support older OSes. From another reply, it sounds like a new version of the Java plug-in Apple is releasing will meet this criteria. Also, being Apple, this is going to happen every 3 years anyway.

Here's what should *not* determine when to end support: "I'm a programmer and working with this old API is soooo painful and my compiles take a few seconds longer! Whine!"

Or in other words, support decisions should *never* be made just based on developer preferences. The purpose of writing software is to serve your users. Either you're a professional developer and you deal with the slightly older APIs/compilers to serve your users, or you're a hack.

Re:Nooo !

[psergiu]

Usually all those old 10.4 running macs are Grandma's and Auntie's browsing machines. Switching those machines to Linux is not advised unless you want to spend the next 3 months re-training their users.

Re:Nooo !

[smash]

More modern software.... Except for... you know... the GUI, the object orientation, the plug and play, display PDF, etc. Basically everything that makes the mac nicer to use than some shitbox clone running ubuntu.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a free unix fan, but if you've got OS X, as far as usability and "getting shit done" goes, linux or any of the other Free unices is a step backwards.

Re:Nooo !

[Reapman]

I would guess that both you and I are not qualified enough to answer the reason as to why, however I'm rather confident the reason wasn't because it added "a few seconds" of compile time. Supporting legacy systems isn't just a matter of how long it takes code to compile, there's issues with maintainability, as well as speed and performance. Which DOES affect the end user.

I imagine that the userbase that uses Firefox with 10.4 is small enough, and the issues with supporting it big enough, that it makes sense to drop support.

Besides, isn't BLOAT one of the biggest complaints with Firefox on here? Worst case if 10.4 support is really that huge of an issue someone will fork it.

Re:Nooo !

[oscartheduck]

It's an open source project. The old saw about supporting the code yourself if you don't like what's happening is entirely applicable here. The folks at Mozilla have decided to spend their money elsewhere. You can stand on the shoulders of their last release if you'd like to.

Re:Nooo !

[Dog-Cow]

Is Tiger still getting updates?

Re:Nooo !

[noidentity]

That's the biggest thing that's pissed me off about Mac OS X releases: you had to use a newer version of GCC, but then your programs simply would not run on older versions of the OS, even if you used the same source code. It'd just quit immediately without any message to the user.

Re:Nooo !

[Blakey Rat]

Supporting legacy systems isn't just a matter of how long it takes code to compile, there's issues with maintainability,

Well, a new API could make the codebase easier to maintain, but that doesn't affect the end-user. (Unless you're admitting that the codebase was impossibly-difficult to maintain before the new API came out.)

as well as speed and performance.

I concede this, but I doubt it's significant. (Again: unless the code was a complete mess before.) Nothing 10.4 did made the user's hardware any faster, and there's no reason to believe that the libraries Apple added are faster than the ones Mozilla was using before. (They might be, but you can't just *assume* they are.)

I imagine that the userbase that uses Firefox with 10.4 is small enough, and the issues with supporting it big enough, that it makes sense to drop support.

True. The reason I brought up the developer line is that I've seen a lot of open source projects, especially on Mac, drop old technologies like a hot-potato time and time again. There are tons of apps I stopped getting updates to, apparently punishment for the heinous crime of owning a G5 computer a full 6 months after Apple switched to x86.

Let's face it, if your development staff is:
1) Volunteer
2) Really, really excited about technology
They're not going to want to use an "old" API or IDE, even if it's only 3 years old. They're not going to want to get their PPC computer out of the closet to QA. (Assuming they even QA in the first place.)

Hell, the Mac software community used to point out "Cocoa!!" as a feature. And got pissy with me when I told them that Cocoa isn't a feature, it's an implementation detail and your users don't give a flying crap.

If left to their own devices, the *only* OS support you'd offer is "whatever the very latest is, until the next one comes out." That's why support needs to be a managerial decision, and why it needs to be data-backed. It's also something that's likely to slide unless there's enforcement.

Maybe Mozilla's done the user research and they know that they're not dropping many users, but just from reading the comments in this Slashdot thread, I think they may be dropping more users than they realize.

Re:Nooo !

[smash]

You can compile for older operating systems in xcode by toggling a switch. Hopefully the GCC bullshit will be laid to rest when CLANG is integrated into 10.7 or whatever.

Re:Nooo !

[Blakey Rat]

But the process of writing software doesn't happen without developers. And the messier and kludgier a codebase is, the harder it is to get devs to work on it.

Yah, I get that.

What I'm really trying to do is appeal to their professionalism and maybe get open source developers to take a little bit more pride in their work. Probably not going to work in a community that doesn't understand the difference between "development" and "coding," but I'll try anyway.

If nothing else, I still have a G5 with 10.4 on it myself. (Admittedly, I haven't turned it on in awhile.)

Re:Nooo !

[smash]

Usage stats for mozilla 3.6 show approximately 12% of mac users running 10.4.

Re:Nooo !

[gnud]

Newer Firefox will probably still work on Linux on G4, or in X11 on OSX 10.4. Supporting different hardware platforms and different software platforms is not the same thing.

Also, Google couldn't easily make a universal binary of Chrome, because the javascript engine is x86-specific.

Re:Nooo !

[mini me]

Apple does provide a reasonably stable platform. All of the older APIs will continue to work for many years to come. Firefox has chosen to start using the newer and more powerful APIs which are not available on older systems.

Re:Nooo !

[Blakey Rat]

Speaking as a user, Cocoa most certainly is a feature.

If you're an end-user and you know what Cocoa *is*, that means Apple screwed up somewhere. What framework an application uses is an implementation detail.

The Windows world doesn't advertise an app as being ".net!" because it doesn't freakin' matter... .net apps are the same as Win32 apps. The only reason there's a difference in OS X is because Apple has always treated Carbon as a second-class citizen, since they just didn't give a crap about UI anymore.

The Mac experience is built around the idea of consistency.

Dude.

You're talking to a Mac Classic user. Back then, yes, consistency mattered. Now? Now there's no consistency. None. Nada.

OS X took that and flushed it down the crapper, from when they decided to ship both chrome and aqua windows.

Windows 7 is significantly more consistent, UI-wise, than newer versions of OS X. If consistency is something you care about, you should be using Windows. There was a time when Apple was the only good place to go for us rare users that valued usability, but that time is long-passed. Mac has gone downhill while everybody else is racing upwards, and there's no real noticeable difference anymore.

Re:Nooo !

[MrHanky]

That's got nothing whatsoever to do with "plug and play" or "object orientation", unless you use your own special ad hoc definition -- which was what I suspected, and the reason why I asked: to show that you don't know what you're talking about.

To further show that you don't know what you're talking about, I'm going to drag a picture from Firefox into the Gimp (Gimp opens the image) and OpenOffice Writer (Writer opens the image), into Google Chrome (Chrome opens the image), into vim in editing mode (it pastes the link to the image). Anything else you want me to drag & drop? How about an mp3 from Amarok's playlist into Firefox (Firefox plays a song!).

QED: you're full of shit.

Re:Nooo !

[Blakey Rat]

Call us back when you've had to write reams of code to put backward-compatibility hacks into your programs just to support an already-tiny, ever-decreasing, perpetually-complaining, and ultimately unpleaseable audience of people who refuse to upgrade their systems. We'll see how relative "whine" is when you're the one writing the code.

Yah. I maintain a 15k line Javascript application that's compatible with IE 5.5. IE 5.5. And we're not wussing-out using any of those frameworks or anything, either. Nor are we skimping on testing. Sure, it's not a desktop app, but believe me I know exactly what the score is.

Suck it, Mr. Trying-To-Make-Me-Look-Like-A-Hypocrite-Guy.

Re:Nooo !

[palegray.net]

The GP specifically stated that the older Mac is a good browsing platform. It's not hard to train Grandma or Auntie to click a different icon to launch their web browser. Actually, come to think of it, it's the same icon but in a different place. That's not a huge leap; my mother in-law knows jack about computers, and easily switched to using Ubuntu on her laptop for stuff that is considerably more complicated than this.

Re:Nooo !

[Rockoon]

When it is observed that these professional developers that work for Mozilla have basically told a whole bunch of people to fuck off, waving the your hands screaming "but its open source" does not negate the criticism.

The real question is, how many 10.4 users had donated to Mozilla prior to them being told to fuck off.

Re:Nooo !

[Kjella]

How about keeping a security-patched branch? There can be some middle ground between bringing everything forward and dropping support completely. I mean sooner or later the world has to move on where new features are only on those platforms that support them.

Re:Nooo !

[Blakey Rat]

What framework an application uses is usually obvious from the application's appearance, behavior and interaction with the rest of the system.

Sadly, yes, but only because most frameworks are awful. For example, GTK+ looks like an total alien on every OS except Linux. Java, likewise, is crappy on everything.

But it shouldn't be that way.

Every Windows app advertises whether it's .NET or not. Right in the system requirements and installer - "Requires .NET Framework X.Y" and the installer makes it very obvious that when the right version isn't present, it's going to be installed.

You're confusing "feature" and "system requirement."

The Apple developers put Cocoa on their *features* page. .net apps put .net on their *system requirements* page. Apples to oranges.

No they aren't. There are a lot of visual cues which will hint at whether an app is .NET or regular Win32,

Really? Like what?

Re:Nooo !

[Mr. Pibb]

It's exactly this issue that pisses me off about Apple. While your typical /.er might be on a 1-3 year upgrade cycle, a lot of people (ie older parents/grandparents) buy a Mac because it's "easier" and are more inclined to be on a 5-10 year cycle. Their machines serve them well and do what they need--WP, email and web. Speed is NOT an issue when you're reading the news online or writing your Xmas letter. As far as my mom is concerned, there is no difference between the versions of OS X-- and why new versions of Firefox won't run anymore will baffle her.

Yes, Apple is trying to be revolutionary and keep themselves at the forefront of technology, as well as maintain a manageable codebase. But this has been coming at the expense of (prematurely) obsoleting still-good hardware in the hands of a market that Apple has decided to ignore.

Re:Nooo !

[bonch]

Windows 7 is significantly more consistent, UI-wise, than newer versions of OS X. If consistency is something you care about, you should be using Windows.

You don't know what the hell you're talking about.

There are at least five different menu styles in Windows, multiple dialog styles (including some dating back to Windows 3.1), toolbar styles including ribbons, and more.

OS X had...textured windows. And those were unified in Leopard.

Re:Nooo !

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The best way to get somebody to act like a "professional" is to offer to regularly emit blocks of US Mint gift cards in their direction for as long as they act so. Any other method amounts to playing silly emotional games(which, to their credit, do sometimes work).

Re:Nooo !

[Reservoir Penguin]

This is just plain silly. I am willing to bet my 1.2 ghz G4 ibook is quite a bit faster than the mainstream 1.6 ghz Atoms found in most Windows netbooks nowdays, and those netbooks have no problem running the latest versions of Firefox. It is still a very good and usable machine and I am not going to be wasteful and buy news hardware just for the sake of new hardware.

Re:Nooo !

[RebelWebmaster]

The 10.4-supporting Firefox 3.6.x series will be getting security updates at least until mid-2011 (assuming the non-10.4-supporting 3.7.x or whatever they end up calling it series ships by the end of the year as planned). It's not inconceivable that it'll end up being longer than that given that Firefox 3.0.x still receives security updates.

Re:Nooo !

[BZ]

> Mozilla should have a very clear policy about backwards compatibility and follow it to the
> letter.

The basic setup is:

1) Once an OS vendor drops support for an OS, support for it will not be maintained unless
        it's really easy to do.
2) Whether an OS is supported depends on whether there are resources to support it and on
        how many users are using it.

It's not exactly a clear policy, but the important part is that support decisions are pretty complicated and involve a lot of factors.... it's not clear to me what a sane policy would be that would not lead to dropping support in some cases when there's no real reason to do it.

> Until Apple actively does something to break the older "deprecated" code in Firefox,
> they should support older OSes

10.6 dropped ATSUI support. 10.4 doesn't have Core Text. So the only way to support both is to have codepaths to use both text rendering backends and switch at runtime. Does that count as "does something to break"? ;)

Thing is, it's all software. Everything can be worked around. The question is the cost (to users, in the end, either in terms of money or in terms of things users want that don't happen).

> and you deal with the slightly older APIs/compilers to serve your users

Not that simple. You have to use gcc 4.0 if you're going to run on 10.4. So doing that serves the 10.4 users. But on 10.5 and 10.6, using gcc 4.2 gives a pretty significant across-the-board speedup. So to properly serve those users, you want to be using gcc 4.2. Where that leaves you is either underserving 10.5/10.6 users to better serve 10.4 users or vice versa (at which point relative numbers of users start to matter), or shipping separate binaries with the ensuing user confusion during downloading, etc. So there's not an obvious course of action here that best serves "the users". It's a matter of compromise.

Re:Nooo !

[BZ]

> Maybe Mozilla's done the user research and they know that they're not dropping many users,

The second link in the summary has the data on that. In brief, as of end of January 1010, 25% of Firefox 3.5 Mac users (about 1.4 million users, or about 0.5% of total Firefox users) are using OS 10.4. 12% of Firefox 3.6 Mac users (about 36,000 users) are using OS 10.4.

The big question mark, of course, is what those numbers will look like about 15 months from now, which is the earliest that Firefox 3.6 might be going out of support...

Re:Nooo !

[RebelWebmaster]

They actually used to use the OSX spellchecker and stopped because it had major issues with dictionary support.
Here's the bug for it

Re:Nooo !

[hairyfeet]

That is one of the things I like about Windows. Say what you want about MSFT but their support cycles are pretty damned long and if you know anything at all about Windows it isn't hard to get it running well on older hardware. Thanks to those nice long support cycles and easy tweaking my GF is using a spare 733MHz office box with a 5200 PCI and 384Mb of RAM with XP Pro to surf the net while I replaced her motherboard in her 3GHz P4. For the things she does, surfing, webmail, Facebook, it works just fine and she is quite happy with it. I just added Comodo AV+Firewall and set everything to auto and she is a happy little camper.

And with the spare LGA775 board I had lying around and a $30 memory upgrade her P4 will probably last her until 2014 easy, and if she still has the box by then I'll just max out the RAM and give her Windows 7/8, which I'm sure will run just fine on it. Say what you want about MSFT but you really do get a pretty long time when it comes to security updates. I just now retired my 1GHz P3 Celeron with Win2K with a 1.8GHz Sempron box with XP that I'm sure will run Windows 7 just fine when XP is EOL. It makes a great whisper quiet netbox and uses very little electricity.

If all you are doing is basic tasks there really isn't a need with Windows to have the latest and greatest hardware, and it is certainly nicer than shitcanning working hardware. According to Wikipedia Apple only released 10.4 in 2005, correct? Man you really gotta stay on the upgrade treadmill with those guys. I think I'll stick with the OS that lets me build monster quads for less than $700 and keep them for a decade, thanks anyway. I gotta admit those Apples are pretty, but they ain't replace my machine every other year pretty, at least not to me. I guess for all those 10.4 guys getting dumped by the Moz there is always Opera. It still works on 10.4, right?

Re:Nooo !

[Blakey Rat]

You're welcome to disagree with me, but it's not really fair to say I don't know what I'm talking about when I've used (and written software for) both OSes in question a significant amount of time.

Re:Nooo !

[Gr8Apes]

Dude.

You're talking to a Mac Classic user. Back then, yes, consistency mattered. Now? Now there's no consistency. None. Nada.

OS X took that and flushed it down the crapper, from when they decided to ship both chrome and aqua windows.

Windows 7 is significantly more consistent, UI-wise, than newer versions of OS X. If consistency is something you care about, you should be using Windows. There was a time when Apple was the only good place to go for us rare users that valued usability, but that time is long-passed. Mac has gone downhill while everybody else is racing upwards, and there's no real noticeable difference anymore.

Please don't even mention consistency and Windows in the same sentence. It's an obvious troll.

There's at least 3 classes of windows, with some being resizable, some not, some being scrollable, others not. Some you can cut and paste from, others not. And these are all in various system administration applications installed in a plain vanilla default installation. We won't even start with the the classic vs category vs "new" view of Control panel, or any of the other multitudes of changes that were made for apparently no good reason other than to drive new revenue in the MCSE training/certification program.

Re:Nooo !

[commodoresloat]

Java, likewise, is crappy on everything.

I thought consistency is a good thing?

Loose the (almost) dead weight

[carlhaagen]

Leopard (10.5) was released end of october 2007, 2.5 years ago, and 2.5 years is well enough time to let end-users move on and revision their computing. Everyone knows there are 10.4'ers out there still, and even 10.3'ers (may the Universe and the Great Magnet help them), but dragging excess weight is nothing short of a problem akin to shooting oneself in the foot - just take a look at microsoft and their eternal love for backwards compatibility, and all the hell that comes with it in windows.

Re:Loose the (almost) dead weight

[RebelWebmaster]

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?

Wait, I don't undersand this...

[Cowclops]

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.

Re:Wait, I don't undersand this...

[carlhaagen]

Apple moves at a completely different pace when it comes to updates and reworking their OS, compared to Microsoft. The PPC part is just one bit, but Leopard does run on PPC machines, so Firefox will still contain both PPC and x86 code for the OS X version. The problem is more that there were a lot of favorable improvements taking place in 10.5 almost coercing developers to make use of them, combined with lots of API-level stuff from the 10.4 selection going deprecated.

Re:Wait, I don't undersand this...

[eihab]

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?

According to the article:

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. Other areas where 10.4 support
consumes our time, makes our code more complex or error-prone, and/or
limits our capabilities include complex text input (IME), out-of-
process plugins, printing, native menus, and Core Animation.
Furthermore, Apple's upcoming JavaPlugin2 will not support Mac OS X
10.4.

Sounds like OS X's API has evolved quite a bit in the last 5 years.

The weird part in the article was when the Mozilla platform engineer said "Neither Safari nor Chrome have to deal with this". I don't know about Chrome but from Apple's website it looks like Tiger is still supported for Safari 4:

Tiger System Requirements

Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and Security Update 2009-002 or later

Premature

[Chris Lawrence]

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.

Re:Premature

[Cowclops]

Yeah. My girlfriend has a macbook, I have no idea exactly when she bought it, but its a Core2Duo system at like 2ghz and it has Tiger on it. She's not enough of a computer freak to upgrade everything that comes out, she just has an irrational hatred of PCs. If her laptop seems pretty new but only has tiger on it, that means she might have bought it in like... 2007 before Leopard was released. So I guess that means she'd have to upgrade to get Firefox (not that she cares at all).

Minor version

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Minor version

[ColdWetDog]

I'm surprised that so much version specific code is needed to support a minor release of the OS. Why is that?

With Apple and OS X "point releases" (10.x) are not minor version changes. They include major shifts in APIs and decrements of complete frameworks (ie. Carbon to Cocoa). Apple operates on a different timing and structure scheme than Microsoft. Neither necessarily better or worse, but different.

If your 10.2 machine works for your application and doesn't need any upgraded software for fulfill it's purpose in the grand scheme of things, just leave it alone.....

How can I upgrade?

[The Flymaster]

So, where can I get a guaranteed legal version of Leopard? I've got a G4 Powerbook that I never upgraded, and it seems that Apple doesn't sell 10.5 anymore.

Re:How can I upgrade?

[jimicus]

I called up my local Apple store with exactly this question. They said "Come in and buy a retail copy of 10.6, we'll burn you a disc with 10.5 on".

YMMV.

exorcise?

[Anonymous Coward]

excise

Firefox already had problems

[sh00z]

My "recreational" computer is a G4 Powerbook running 10.4, and I've found that realistically, Mozilla stopped caring over a year ago. Even chatting in Facebook is an exercise in futility. Switching to Safari 4 was a no-brainer.

Phasing out support for 10.4? I still run 10.3!

[The Breeze]

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?

Re:Good decision.

[Albanach]

It's foolish to continue supporting obsolete platforms until the end of time

And as many posts above demonstrate, 10.4 is hardly obsolete, having come installed on new Macs purchased two and a half years ago. The official upgrade cost is around $100. 17% of the cost of a new Mac Mini.

So the operating system is in wide use by people faced with a pretty substantial upgrade cost.

Re:Good decision.

[psergiu]

Leopard won't install on anything with a cpu slower than 867 Mhz so the following machines are forced to remain on 10.4 Tiger:

- Dual 800Mhz G4 Powermacs and slower.
- All G4 cubes
- All G3 iMacs and most of the iLamp G4 iMacs
- All G3 iBooks, a some G4 iBooks.
- Almost all Titanium Powerbooks

Re:Affecting a small audience

[psergiu]

Firefox on OS X updates automatically. Users just have to push a "OK" button in a dialog to re-open their current windows in tabs in the updated version.

Re:For all those PPCs out there

[dadragon]

You're certainly not wrong. I started using Linux on my old PowerBook to get Java 6. However, Linux on PPC is not supported all that well on most distributions. Fedora and Debian are about the best. Ubuntu has a port, but apparently it's not officially supported. I use Debian.

Re:Phasing out support for 10.4? I still run 10.3!

[B3ryllium]

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?

Re:Good decision.

[Eravau]

"Official" upgrade cost (for this OS that came with my new computer just over 2 years ago) may be around $100... but if I upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5... then I have to buy a new version of Adobe Creative Suite. That makes the "unofficial" upgrade cost somewhere around $1,900... 300% of the cost of a new Mac Mini.

Re:Phasing out support for 10.4? I still run 10.3!

[PenguSven]

It can be really hard if the OS designer really doesn't care about backwards compatibility and just expects all the users to buy new versions of every piece of software every couple years.

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.

And by business world I mean the people in suits and ties who drink real coffee and get stuff done, not those guys with turtlenecks and lattes whose job is to pat other turtleneck wearers on the back while simultaneously judging them on their eyewear.

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.

Chip sets

[Frankenshteen]

Speaking for myself; keeping the G5 on 10.4 because it's the last OS X version specifically designed for the power pc chipset, right? 10.5 ushered in the migration to intel architecture, and 10.5 supposedly served both ppc and intel, but was considered relatively inferior to Tiger stability-wise. With Snow Leopard, even apple made it clear they've retired support for legacy, non-intel, systems. Can't remember the last time i got a software update for anything other than safari or itunes...

Or just switch to one of the other options

[weston]

Or use one of the other options: Safari, Camino, iCab, or Omniweb. Probably some others that I've missed.

It's interesting these folks don't have any apparent problem with supporting 10.4.

Re:Or just switch to one of the other options

[barzok]

Does the latest Safari still support Tiger?

Re:Or just switch to one of the other options

[dgatwood]

Yes. That's what makes this so bizarre; historically Open Source projects have continued to support old OSes and hardware for years after Apple drops support. This is very surreal.

Re:Some statistics

[dasmoo]

===========
Firefox 3.5
===========
10.6 (Darwin 10.x): 1,497,221 (26%)
10.5 (Darwin 9.x): 2,855,842 (50%)
10.4 (Darwin 8.x): 1,379,770 (24%)
All versions of Mac OS X: 5,732,833

===========
Firefox 3.6
===========
10.6 (Darwin 10.x): 186,825 (59%)
10.5 (Darwin 9.x): 91,478 (29%)
10.4 (Darwin 8.x): 35,960 (12%)
All versions of Mac OS X: 314,263

Re:Phasing out support for 10.4? I still run 10.3!

[Korbeau]

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?