"Overall I think there's a lot of technical reasons why 10.5 should be a new baseline, and the number of users is small and diminishing in any case, so I definitely support this from the Firefox side," said Michael Connor, one of the company's software engineers, later in the discussion thread. "One major benefit of moving to 10.5 as a minimum is using 10.5+ APIs without runtime detection and build-time SDK trickery," said Josh. But his most compelling argument, based on the response it got from other developers, was that dropping 10.4 will let Mozilla use APIs (application programming interfaces) available only in Leopard and later. The company will then start working on the Gecko 1.9.2 engine, which would power Firefox.next.Īlthough Josh said that 36% of the Mac OS X users running Firefox are still on Tiger, he added that that number was sure to drop over the next year-and-a-half. Mozilla is currently working on Gecko 1.9.1, the engine that powers Firefox 3.5, which is slated for final release before the end of this quarter. Our 10.4 support would end a little over 3 years after the last copy of 10.4 shipped," said a Mozilla developer identified only as "Josh." Apple debuted Mac OS X 10.4 in April 2005, then supplanted it with 10.5, aka Leopard, in October 2007. "If we drop support for 10.4 in Gecko 1.9.2 then 10.4 users will be supported until approximately Q1 2011 via Firefox 3.5.
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