Mozilla ditches Mac OS X 10.4 support in fresh Firefox

Toothless Tiger loses fight

By Kelly Fiveash, 25th February 2010

Mozilla has officially ditched Firefox support for Apple Mac OS X 10.4 for upcoming versions of its browser, despite gripes from some web surfers.

The open source group confirmed on Tuesday that, following heated discussion from the Mozilla community, it would only support Mac OS X 10.5 or later when it released the next iteration of its browser.

"We believe a Mac OS X 10.5 minimum will allow us to provide the best experience possible to our users," said Mozilla Mac programmer Josh Aas in a mailing list message.

The decision was essentially an academic one after Mozilla confirmed plans in early February to release version 1.9.3 of its Gecko rendering engine later this year.

At the same time support for Tiger will be dropped altogether, even though the Mozilla Foundation estimated that nearly 1.5 million Mac OSX 10.4 users are still surfing the web with Firefox 3.5. Meanwhile 36,000 Tiger-fanciers are running Firefox 3.6, which is Mozilla’s current version of its popular browser.

Mozilla spun out Firefox 3.6 earlier this year, which does support Tiger.

“This does not affect current users of Firefox, or updates to Firefox 3.6: Mac OS X 10.4 will continue to be supported via Firefox 3.6 until its end-of-life (not yet scheduled),” said Aas.

“Thanks to everyone who provided input on this issue. We believe a Mac OS X 10.5 minimum will allow us to provide the best experience possible to our users." ®

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Highly Rated

Posted Thursday 25th February 2010 14:20 GMT

Subliteratus

Oh boo hoo

I got into computers because it was all new stuff with shiny lights and buttons. The lure was being at the cutting edge of a new enterprise for humanity, finding out how to do new things on new toys. Now I'm surrounded by folks describing themselves as IT professionals who don't even have their own computer in their homes. And people are seriously whining about how they can't use the most modern version of Firefox on their superannuated junk piles? A program that did't even exist when they bought their dusty difference engines?

Ditch the old crap, send it to the 3rd World or just chuck it in a skip for the love of the sensless, uncaring, mechanistic universe. And buy a new computer even if baby's teeth have to grow crooked.

Posted Monday 1st March 2010 04:49 GMT

jeanX

Mozzilla ditches....

You should know that when disposing of your hardware to 3rd world countries,

it's only certain elements they are looking for, largely metal, used again in cell phones.Kids play on all these junked computers,cell phones, printers, TV's, etc.The workers breathe in poisonous fumes all day.Plus, using the HDD, one can find all kinds of scams.That's why 3rd world countries are the first in scams.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/video/video_index.html

Posted Friday 26th February 2010 11:28 GMT