Mozilla is cutting the cord with Mac OS X 10.4. The open source organization has indicated that forthcoming versions of its Firefox browser won’t support the aging Mac OS, claiming that continued support has been a “hindrance.” Datamation has the story.
Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser is used today by over 6 million Apple Mac users. To date, Mozilla has supported Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 for both Firefox 3.5 and for the recently released Firefox 3.6, though not all three Mac OS versions are likely to be supported under Firefox’s next major release.
“Mac OS X 10.4 was released in April of 2005 and a lot has changed since then,” Mozilla developer Josh Aas wrote in a Mozilla mailing list posting. “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.”
With the decision to stop supporting Mac 10.4 moving forward, Mozilla is giving older Mac users some time before they really need to worry. Currently 24 percent of Firefox 3.5’s Mac users are running OS X 10.4, it said. That number drops by half for the newer Firefox 3.6, with only 12 percent of its Mac users running OS X 10.4.
Users of OS X 10.4 — a release that’s also known as “Tiger” — will continue to be supported until Firefox 3.6 hits its own end-of-life, which might not be until 2011. Mozilla has recently started a new way to add features to Firefox 3.6, called the “Lorentz” branch, so users don’t have to wait until a major release debuts to receive new features.
While Mozilla developers have laid out their case for a transition away from supporting Mac OS X 10.4 in the future, not everyone is thrilled with the decision. Already, more than a hundred message have been posted in Mozilla’s mailing list thread on the subject of dropping Mac OS X 10.4 support, with scores of Apple fans giving Mozilla their two cents’ worth.
