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."
Nooo ! (Score:5, 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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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: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.
Re:Nooo ! (Score:5, 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.
Re:Nooo ! (Score:5, 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.
Re:Nooo ! (Score:5, Informative)
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> 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
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Also, Google couldn't easily make a universal binary of Chrome, because the javascript engine is x86-specific.
Re:Nooo ! (Score:5, 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.
Re:Nooo ! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 ! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 t
Re:Nooo ! (Score:4, Funny)
Java, likewise, is crappy on everything.
I thought consistency is a good thing?
Re:Nooo ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Or just switch to one of the other options (Score:3)
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.
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Does the latest Safari still support Tiger?
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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.
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The real question is, how many 10.4 users had donated to Mozilla prior to them being told to fuck off.
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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.
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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.
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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 my
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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.
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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 w
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.
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Here's the bug for it [mozilla.org]
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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: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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Chip sets (Score:2, Informative)
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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.
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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.
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Except for... you know... the GUI, the object orientation
KDE Plasma Desktop is based on Qt, an object-oriented toolkit. GNOME (formerly GNU Network Object Model Environment) is based on GTK+, which is object-oriented even though written in C. If this isn't what you meant, could you be more specific?
the plug and play
It depends on whether you have bleeding-edge hardware (more likely to include a driver CD for the big two desktop operating systems) or slightly older hardware (more likely to be in Linux driver repositories). I haven't had much of a problem getting Ubuntu to autodetec
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As far as display PDF goes... look it up. I'm not talking about the ability to display PDFs. I'm talking about device independent rendering that looks the same on any device.
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So what kind of "object orientation" and "plug and play" does the Mac have that Linux doesn't?
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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 past
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So...just use a browser that still gets maintained?
Opera probably will be for quite some time, it's current version officialy supports 10.3
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No they aren't but using a browser that is no longer getting security updates doesn't seem like a very good idea to me.
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Is Tiger still getting updates?
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No they aren't but using a browser that is no longer getting security updates doesn't seem like a very good idea to me.
Using a browser on an operating system that is no longer getting security updates doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. That's why Mozilla felt justified in dropping support for Windows 98 and Windows ME when it did. When does Apple plan to stop issuing security updates for 10.4?
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Loose the (almost) dead weight (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Loose the (almost) dead weight (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
XP is dead weight (Score:2)
Wait, I don't undersand this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait, I don't undersand this... (Score:5, 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
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It's because both Safari and Chrome rely on WebKit for rendering. Mozilla relies on Gecko (their own engine).
I know that. But WebKit still supports Tiger, or Apple is hacking in backwards compatibility. Either way, it sounds a bit disingenuous to say that Safari doesn't have to deal with Tiger when it clearly does on one level or another.
Premature (Score:5, 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.
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Exactly, I have family members in the same boat. You've got people with Macs *still under warrantee* (if they got Applecare) and they won't be able to run the latest version of Firefox without upgrading the OS? Not cool.
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Updates for Safari (including v4) are available for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) so what's the big issue?
If these users aren't upgrading their OS, they probably aren't the sort of people who are particularly bothered about having a specific browser.
It's not like Firefox is a spectacularly great brow
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http://xkcd.com/684/ [xkcd.com]
Sorry,couldn't resist...
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She should upgrade anyway - Tiger's no longer getting security updates, and Snow Leopard will only set her back $30.
Minor version (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (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.....
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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: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.
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What City?
All the bozos here in Atlanta/Lennox said was: "Try Amazon", and that was months ago.
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Try these guys: http://www.apple.com/retail/lenoxsquare/ [apple.com] if they can't help, then I am not sure who can?
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exorcise? (Score:3, Informative)
excise
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No, turns out the code left in there to support Tiger is of supernatural origin. They had to give commit access to a priest.
Firefox already had problems (Score:2, Informative)
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Yep, me too. My Powerbook is my workhorse to support my table-top gaming. I'm running mysql and apache with php with several wikis and php scripts.
I've been having so many problems with Firefox crashing and increasing the temp of the powerbook I switched back to Safari 4 a few months ago. I have to deal with ads but at least my browser doesn't crash any more.
[John]
Phasing out support for 10.4? I still run 10.3! (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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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 r
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You might look into using Opera, its latest 10-series still supports not only 10.4, but also 10.3. Also has quite good security record and on older machines it is readily apparent how snappy Opera is (don't forget using its built-in adblocker)
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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
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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.
Early compared to Windows (Score:2)
It would seem strange to drop support for OS X 10.4, released in 2005, while keeping support for Windows 2000, released in 2000. Even if Win2000 support is dropped, XP was released in 2001 is certainly staying.
I know Apple isn't exactly famous for backwards compatibility, but is it this extreme? Is the stereotype true that Mac owners are people with too much money to spare that will buy anything as soon as Apple tells them too? Are there no businesses using 10.4 that are holding off on upgrading?
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Microsoft has been pretty aggressive about using DirectX to shove the gamer kiddies forward into the future; but that isn't really an issue for FF.
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I guess it's to do with percentages...
What percentage of windows users still use XP? Probably quite high, and there isn't much difference between 2000 and XP.
On the other hand, the percentage of Mac users still running 10.4 is quite low, at least all the mac users i know are running something more recent these days even if they might also own an older machine still running 10.4.
Also to do with how recently each version was available, XP is still on sale and you can buy machines even today with it preinstall
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Garbage collection, fast enumeration, properties, Coretext, etc. The ui might look the same between os x versions, but coding for 10.5 vs 10.4 or earlier is significantly different and less painful.
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The Win32 API hasn't changed as much; one can still use the latest compilers (VC++ or GCC) to make programs that run on Windows 2000 and all newer versions of Windows. This does not seem to be the case for OS X.
Dropping OS X 10.4 support is relatively minor compared to Firefox Linux support; Firefox
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It would seem strange to drop support for OS X 10.4, released in 2005, while keeping support for Windows 2000, released in 2000. Even if Win2000 support is dropped, XP was released in 2001 is certainly staying.
I don't think the Win2000 code is much different than the WinXP plus if you look at it from the number of current users Win2k has to be over 9000 times higher than OS X 10.4. Die hard OS X 10.4 users can always fork it.
Affecting a small audience (Score:2)
I'd expect that very few people still running Tiger (two major releases out of date) are going to be updating their Firefox install to the latest and greatest. And no, the ten people in the Slashdot audience who pipe up and say they're running Tiger for some esoteric reason are not representative of the whole.
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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.
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Not everyone subscribes to the idea that they MUST purchase the latest and greatest OS for their hardware. I don't believe that thinking "I'm not going to blow $100 on an upgrade I DON'T NEED or I CAN'T USE" is an esoteric reason at all. Step out of your reality distortion field.
Welcome To The Upgrade Treadmill (Score:2)
For anyone who has been with Apple since the beginning of Mac OS X, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Mac OS X is on a definite upgrade treadmill: Apple wants to do a major OS update every 2 years and nothing is sacred - they're boldly going forward and they can't find reverse. More to the point, Apple has decided not to put a lot of effort in to supporting legacy operating systems, so they only do feature updates on the current OS, and security updates on the previous OS. In other words, 10.4 no longer ge
Re:Good decision. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Sounds about right. If you don't want to pay for operating systems, then why the fuck buy a mac in the first place? Running Linux or BSD is cheaper on a cheap pc clone.
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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
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Or they could just, ya know, use Safari 4. Firefox and Opera are both pretty crummy examples of good Mac software.
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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.
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Yeah, it is funny that the company with the most intimate knowledge of the operating system (because they wrote it) can keep writing updates, isn't it? Strange how that works.
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