Accelerated compositing, WebGL, and out-of-process plugins are not available on Mac OS X 10.5. There are already some significant ways in which Firefox on Mac OS X 10.5 has fallen behind Firefox on newer versions of Mac OS X. In addition to the core Mac OS X platform layer (Cocoa widgets), subsystems such as plugins and graphics are affected by the Mac OS X 10.5 requirement.īuild, release, and testing infrastructure resources are also consumed by the Mac OS X 10.5 requirement. Currently we have to go back and make sure we didn’t cause problems on Mac OS X 10.5 every time we do integration work for newer OS versions.

We still have significant integration work to do for Mac OS X 10.7 and we’re getting more for Mac OS X 10.8.

This requires resources, and with limited resources this sometimes means we have to make tough decisions about where to invest. This means that when Firefox 16 ships, Mac OS X 10.5 users will likely make up less than 10% of Mac OS X users.Īpple releases new versions of its operating systems relatively quickly and each new version contains significant changes that we must adapt to. Trends) Mac OS X 10.5 users have been declining by 1-2% per month (as a share of our total Mac OS X users). Of those Mac OS X users, 17% are on Mac OS X 10.5, 35% are on Mac OS X 10.6, and 48% are on Mac OS X 10.7. Mac OS X User Breakdown) Mac OS X users make up 5.0% of Firefox 12 (current stable) users as of May 12, 2012. Mac OS X 10.8 will be released during the summer of 2012. Mac OS X Release Dates) 10.5 was released in October of 2007, 10.6 was released in June of 2009, 10.7 was released in July of 2011. To be clear: this is not a decision that has been made, I’m proposing it here in order to get feedback.

I'd like to propose that we remove support for Mac OS X 10.5 in Firefox 16, which should ship on or near October 2, 2012.

Firefox for mac os 10.7