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."
How can I upgrade? (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.
Re:Nooo ! (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.
Re:Nooo ! (Score:5, 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?
Re:Nooo ! (Score:2, Interesting)
Tiger is pretty old - 2005 vintage. 5 years old in hardware terms is ancient. If you're still on a PowerPC macintosh, and are expecting continued hardware support, its time to wake up and smell the roses - a mac mini will be much faster than your current box.
If you're on an intel mac, the upgrade is cheap and worth it.
Re:Nooo ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Is Tiger still getting updates?
Re:Nooo ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nooo ! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.