Mozilla has announced that they are going to drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger definitively. “Mac OS X 10.4 was released in April of 2005 and a lot has changed since then,” Josh Aas writes, “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. Neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this.”
I think maybe there’s a mistake there. 🙂
s/Safari/Firefox/ perhaps?
Are they going to drop XP version too. XP was out in 2001 4 years older then 10.4?
Did you read the article? It’s not about dropping support for old OSs just because they’re old. It’s about dropping support for old OSs that also happen to be a pain in the ass to support because of different libraries and API’s available. Microsoft happens to be better at background compatibility than Apple in this respect, so I assume that supporting XP is not a huge chore. Also XP still has significantly greater percentage share of the Windows market than 10.4 has of the OSX market.
XP has a significantly greater share of users than the entire MacOS, never mind the hard-to-support 10.4. So, what do you think?
but.. but.. that’t not fair
Sounds a lot like much of the discussion when Pat dropped Gnome from Slackware heh
Isn’t Safari still supported on 10.4?
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
Also, isn’t it misleading to measure from when 10.4 was released? Isn’t it more meaningful to measure from when 10.5 was released, since machines sold prior to that point came with 10.4? So in this case, we’re talking about dropping support for machines from Oct 2007 and earlier which have not been upgraded?
Maybe it’s my old age talking, but 2007 just seems so recent.
It’s all a consequence of choosing Apple. Apple doesn’t care about backwards compatibility, and more or less only caters only to those who walk the upgrade walk.
Which gives them great advantages, but this is one of the downsides.
Yeah, that’s why I can’t run Safari 4 on my iMac G4 running Tiger.
Oh wait, I can!
I agree with Chaos One! Saying “Safari doesn’t have to deal with this seems misinformed or disingenuous at best”. Since Safari in its current release DOES work on 10.4.
Also, the “Chrome doesn’t do it either” is comparing yourself to someone who you know is NOT doing the right thing in so far as offering anything for users of 10.4 (or PowerPC for that matter! How is it that software based on Webkit and Safari, both PowerPC native, is incompatible with PowerPC?! Guess it takes some doing! Whatever they add like the Javascript engine must be x86 assembly and Google is too chintzy to pay for one full time developer to recode that part in PowerPC assembly instead it would seem to me) and saying “I’m no worse!” rather than “I’m better!”. When did “I’m no worse!” become the ultimate goal of quality and availability?
I for one found it refreshingly good when Apple dropped Safari support for 10.3 and Firefox kept working. Wasn’t one of the great strengths of open source vs. proprietary that you were let off the upgrade treadmill? Seems they are forgetting to hold up that end of the bargain!
On one and the same developer system (10.4) you can concurrently host both XCode 2.x and 3.x, and thus produce both Intel and PowerPC binaries targeted to 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 and I think even 10.6. So lack of Apple supplied tools flexible enough to do the job is NOT holding them back.
And while Apple has a well deserved reputation for secrecy and maybe even at times lack of documentation around proprietary APIs/software, I’d wager this is more a case of “Firefox developers are tired of 10.4 not because it’s old (XP and maybe some supported Linux distros being older) but because they prefer to work on newer Mac OS X releases”.
Edited 2010-02-10 01:21 UTC
Certainly true. It just feels like things are moving very fast here. Just to check on my sanity, I assembled the following from Wikipedia. This measures the number of days of support for each release of Mac OS X in Mozilla, as measured from the release of a successor version of OS X (ie., following my theory above that 10.5 is the relevant release date.)
Dates in US format (sorry!)
9/25/01 10.1 Released
11/30/05 FireFox 1.5 Drops support
1194 days of support since 10.2 shipped
8/24/02 10.2 Released
6/17/08 FireFox 3 Drops support
1698 days of support since 10.3 shipped
10/24/03 10.3 Released
6/17/08 FireFox 3 Drops support
1145 days of support since 10.4 shipped
4/29/05 10.4 Released
11/1/10 FireFox 3.7 (or whatever) will drop support – estimated release
1102 days of support since 10.5 shipped
10/26/07 10.5 Released
I don’t know when 3.7 will ship, and November is being charitable in this case, since I’m giving it almost all of this year to count, and Moz is telling us it will be released this year.
The trend is interesting. It shows that the support window for OS X is consistently narrowing for the last couple of cycles. Note also that in the same timeframe Mac market share has been increasing – dropping support for 10.1 probably didn’t inconvenience that many people; it wasn’t around long, market share was lower, it wasn’t terribly popular, etc.
Amen. If only that was labeled on the box when you hand your credit card over to the guy in the tight Apple shirt with the Cheshire smile at the counter.
Safari 4’s system requirements go back to the G3. Macs using this CPU were long out of the shop before Safari was introduced IIRC. Safari 4 runs on Tiger, which predates Snow Leopard and Leopard.
As my iMac is away for repairs I’m using an iMac G4 from around 2002 and it runs Safari 4 without any problems. I am using it to type this.
If the guy with the Apple shirt told me I could still use a G4 8 years later on running the latest version of Safari (and iTunes for that matter) I wouldn’t have believed him.