Mozilla May Drop Support for Mac OS X Leopard in 2012

[Akshay Masand]

If you are an Apple user with OS X Leopard running, than it might be time for you to update your operating system. Leopard is four years old and many companies, including Apple itself, are droppings support for it. Recently, Mozilla announced that the company may drop support for the Firefox web browser on OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Josh Aas, the Mozilla engineering manager proposed ending support for OS X Leopard in roughly six months. According to him, this time frame will allow Mozilla to address any final bug or security fixes, while also allowing Leopard owners a chance to upgrade their operating system if they want to. It should be noted that Leopard owners don’t have to upgrade if they don’t want to as the current version of Firefox will continue to work. Firefox users just won’t receive any supplemental security fixes or enhancements to the browser after the cut-off point.

Mozilla just earlier this year dropped support for PowerPC-equipped Macs. In early 2010, the company also dropped support for Mac OS X 10.4, or Tiger, after the launch of Firefox 3.6. Users who don't plan to upgrade to Lion will still have other options in face of the inevitable retirement which is to bound to come.

While this might not affect too many users, it isn’t good to see users being forced into an upgrade or being stuck with no support and a lack of future updates. With more and more companies dropping support for OS X Leopard, the time for an upgrade continues to move closer. Will you be one of the affected users?

Source: ComputerWorld

[Daerid]

No.

[s0ulp1xel]

I don't use leopard so I'm ok!

[teej1410]

I don't use Leopard but you could just stick with Safari. I don't see a big difference between Firefox and Safari.

[robbpell]

Who hasn't upgraded yet anyway?

[duromega]

Who hasn't upgraded yet anyway?

many users out there still uses Leopard

[cmwade77]

If you have an Intel Machine, there is no reason not to upgrade to at least Snow Leopard.

[sziklassy]

The irony here is, to my knowledge, they still support windows xp. I think dropping support for leopard is more of a sign that not enough firefox users are still on leopard than anything else. At some point you reach diminishing returns. It's just not economically viable to support an OS that has been abandoned by most of its users for an updated version.