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Mozilla Puts Tiger Out To Pasture

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the get-a-new-kitty dept.

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."

20 of 440 comments (clear)

  1. Nooo ! by psergiu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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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    1. Re:Nooo ! by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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    2. Re:Nooo ! by mini+me · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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?

    3. Re:Nooo ! by bheer · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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    4. Re:Nooo ! by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    5. Re:Nooo ! by Reapman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Nooo ! by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    7. Re:Nooo ! by smash · · Score: 4, Informative

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

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      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
    8. Re:Nooo ! by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    9. Re:Nooo ! by Mr.+Pibb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    10. Re:Nooo ! by bonch · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    11. Re:Nooo ! by BZ · · Score: 4, Informative

      > 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.

  2. Wait, I don't undersand this... by Cowclops · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Wait, I don't undersand this... by carlhaagen · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Wait, I don't undersand this... by eihab · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

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  3. Premature by Chris+Lawrence · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. How can I upgrade? by The+Flymaster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:How can I upgrade? by jimicus · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  5. Re:Good decision. by Albanach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Minor version by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.....

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