Mozilla to end OS X Leopard support?

[Antony]

Mozilla, well known for pushing users to update to the latest whatsoever, is considering to drop the support for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) platform.

Mozilla has stopped supporting PowerPC based Mac in Firefox 4. OS X Leopard (10.5) is the last operating system supporting PowerPC architecture. (Leopard also supports Intel architecture.)

Mozilla's Firefox support on Windows platform does not seem to be this harsh.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111103 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.24

[Anonymosity]

Is it just the changing CPU brands that is the problem for Mozilla? Windows XP is older than even Mac OS Tiger, and they are no longer supporting Tiger, but are supporting XP. I thought that Firefox was already Intel-only, so what is wrong with supporting Leopard Intel?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

[Antony]

That was exactly my point.

It seems to me that the geeks at Mozilla have different standards towards Mac platform.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111103 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.24

[Antony]

Rushing on dropping the support of OS X 10.5.x which was released in late 2007 and crying Leopard is too old, while still keeping the support of 2001 Windows XP technology. This either shows the double standards of the attention-stealing open source group, or Mozilla developers' bias against Mac.

We all know that Mozilla has enjoyed the stealth self-updating method recently. Let's hope that Mozilla will suddenly make Firefox unsupported to OS X Leopard users. That would be a big news.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111103 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.24

[Edward]

Is it just the changing CPU brands that is the problem for Mozilla? Windows XP is older than even Mac OS Tiger, and they are no longer supporting Tiger, but are supporting XP. I thought that Firefox was already Intel-only, so what is wrong with supporting Leopard Intel?

This could be due to the installed user base. More probably still use Windows XP than they do MacOS Tiger.

A lot of businesses are still using Windows XP Professional.

If you look at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... /lifecycle, extended support for Windows XP SP3 continues through April 8, 2014.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.63 Safari/534.3

[Antony]

Okay, we know that Firefox 4 dropped support of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Okay, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was released in 2005, which the open-source group consider that is old. And I am surprised to learn that Firefox 4 still supports Windows 2000 (released in early 2000). They consider OS X 10.4 Tiger old, but the soon-to-be-12-year-old Windows 2000 is still being supported at current Firefox 8.

Unbelievably double standards!

There are some Macs that runs best at Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger instead of jumping to 10.5 Leopard.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111103 Firefox/3.6.24