Mozilla denies OS X Leopard 2012 kill
Mozilla has denied that the death of Firefox on OS X Leopard, released just four years ago, is coming.
The browser operation has downplayed a proposal, broached by one of Firefox’s developers, to stop supporting OS X 10.5 with Firefox 13. This version of Firefox is due to ship on or near 5 June 2012.
The proposal was floated by Josh Aas, a member of the Mozilla platform group who works on Gecko and the Firefox rendering engine. The debate unfolded on Google Groups, here.
Contacted by The Reg, Mozilla released a statement that it attributed to director of engineering Johnathan Nightingale.
Nightingale said: "As part of our open development process we discuss proposals in the open. There are no current plans to EOL Firefox on Mac OS X 10.5."
Aas had given a number of reasons for his proposal to stop Firefox on OS X 10.5. Among the reasons: support swallowed a “non-trivial” amount of resources that cold go to “the majority” of OS X users on versions 10.6 and 10.7. Another reason given was that Firefox on 10.5 had fallen behind the browser on newer versions of OS X.
The suggestion of platform amputation came as Firefox officially became the web’s number three browser by market share in November. Google’s Chrome saw its market share rise to 25.69 per cent with Firefox on 25.23 per cent, according to the latest numbers from StatCounter. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains number one at 40.63 per cent. Firefox had long been the number two to Internet Explorer.
(Source: theregister.co.uk)
