Mozilla Puts Tiger Out To Pasture 440
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."
Loose the (almost) dead weight (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wait, I don't undersand this... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Premature (Score:3, Informative)
exorcise? (Score:3, Informative)
excise
Firefox already had problems (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wait, I don't undersand this... (Score:5, 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 [apple.com] 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
For all those PPCs out there (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Good decision. (Score:3, Informative)
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:Nooo ! (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a taste of the changes between Tiger and Leopard/Snow Leopard [google.com]. Even though Leopard->Snow Leopard was (relatively) incremental stabilization and refinement, remember that Leopard was a *big* upgrade.
Re:How can I upgrade? (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.
Re:Affecting a small audience (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
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:Minor version (Score:5, Informative)
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.....
Re:Nooo ! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Chip sets (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Minor version (Score:1, Informative)
So, you already running a 2.x release. 3.0 is not supported on 10.2/10.3.
10.x releases of OS X are not minor updates. If in doubt look at Ars Technica's reviews [arstechnica.com] (linked on is for 10.6, it liks to the ones for previous versions of OS X). Since 10.2 OS X has migrated to 64 bit, introduced Core Image/Data/Video/Audio/Animation, switched from gcc 3.3 (which barely understands C++) to 4.2, introduced FSEvents, introduced Application signing, and process sandboxing.
I hope they get rid of 10.5 real soon, so they can use Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL (perhaps finally making Firefox as fast as Safari and Chrome).
Re:Nooo ! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nooo ! (Score:3, Informative)
Also, Google couldn't easily make a universal binary of Chrome, because the javascript engine is x86-specific.
Re:Nooo ! (Score:3, Informative)
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:Some statistics (Score:2, Informative)
===========
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:Or just switch to one of the other options (Score:3, Informative)
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:Nooo ! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nooo ! (Score:5, 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.
Re:Nooo ! (Score:3, Informative)
> 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 ! (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the bug for it [mozilla.org]
Re:How can I upgrade? (Score:1, 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.
I just bought a retail 10.5 disc from Apple (had to call their support number, they don't sell it on their website) to upgrade a G4 PowerBook. If I'd known this I'd have bought the retail 10.6, taken the burnt 10.5, and upgraded my wife's MBP from 10.5 to 10.6 for the same price.
crap.