Mozilla Firefox 17 to Officially Drop Support for OS X Leopard

A key software engineer from Mozilla has confirmed that Firefox 16 would be the last version of the world’s most popular web browser to support Apple’s aging OS X Leopard. Firefox 17 will be the first to leave Leopard behind, said Josh Aas, who works on the Firefox platform group.

In a message on Bugzilla, Aas told fellow developers, “We are not planning to support Mac OS X 10.5 with Firefox 17. The builds will fail to run on anything less than Mac OS X 10.6.”

Mozilla’s release schedule suggests Firefox 16 will be out this October, while Firefox 17 will be released no later than November 20. Anyone running OS X 10.5 at that time will not be able to update.

As of June, only 4.6% of all Firefox 13 users were running the browser on a Mac. Of this small number, just 17 percent of Mac users were running it on OS X Leopard.

“Mac OS X 10.5 users have been declining by 1% per month, as a share of our total Mac OS X users,” said Aas.

“This, combined with the impact of the release of Mac OS X 10.8 [Mountain Lion], means that Mac OS X 10.5 users will likely make up around 10% of Mac OS X users when Firefox 17 ships.”

In December 2011, Aas had predicted that Firefox would drop support for Leopard a lot earlier.

“Apple releases new versions of its operating systems relatively quickly, and each new version contains significant changes that we must adapt to,” he said. “This requires resources, and with limited resources this sometimes means we have to make tough decisions about where to invest.”

He added that continued development for the OS X 10.5 platform would drain “a non-trivial portion of the resources [they] have available for Mac OS X development [overall]”.

And, because Apple has long stopped patching Leopard, Firefox is now short of a lot of features on OS X 10.5, including poor Flash performance.

Via: Mozilla Firefox 17 to Officially Drop Support for OS X Leopard