11 February 2010, 11:51

In future Firefox will drop Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger support

Firefox Logo Mozilla has confirmed that it will drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' systems when it releases the next version of its Gecko web rendering platform. According to a post by Firefox developer Josh Aas, the project developers stopped supporting Mac OS X 10.4 in September of 2009, but they "left much of the code required to support that platform in the tree in case we wanted to reverse that decision".

Aas says that keeping the large amount code for Mac OS X 10.4, which was released in April of 2005, in Firefox has been "a hindrance" to developing the popular open source browser, pointing out that "neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this". Mozilla estimates that, based on statistics from the 25th of January, nearly 25% of Firefox's Mac OS X users (approximately 1.4 million) still use 10.4.

Aas said the latest Firefox 3.6 release is based on version 1.9.2 of the Gecko rendering engine and will continue to support 10.4 until it reaches end-of-service. The next major release, scheduled for "later this year", will be based on Gecko 1.9.3 and will no longer contain the old Tiger code.

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