This development is still just under consideration and is by no means a decision of the Mozilla team however, there appears to be more consensus among the Mozilla team for dropping 10.5 support than maintaining it. In addition, there are concerns that despite diminishing percentages because of OS X 10.6 and 10.7 sales in the past few years, that the absolute number of OS X 10.5 users may be more stable than expected. Given these facts about the support of Firefox on Leopard, there is a strong case for dropping support for Leopard however, other developers in the discussion have chimed in suggesting that Mozilla has only dropped support for operating systems because of technical challenges. Additionally, popular plug-ins like Adobe Flash are no longer supported on OS X 10.5. Leopard does not include support for advanced features like WebGL, and maintaining much of the security of the browser would rest on Mozilla's shoulders since Apple has dropped support for OS X 10.5 and no longer issues updates for it.
FIREFOX OS X LEOPARD INSTALL
The Mozilla team expects that by the time Firefox 13 is released, those installing it who are still using Leopard will be only 9 percent of the Firefox Mac install base.īeyond low numbers of users, maintaining Firefox on OS X 10.5 Leopard would also be far more difficult than developing it just for OS X 10.6 and 10.7. While the majority of these are using OS X 10.5 (53 percent), if you just look at Firefox 7 then only about 20 percent of Mac users are running it on OS X 10.5. In addition, technical challenges would make continued support for OS X 10.5 an unnecessary burden on Mozilla's Mac development team.Īccording to Mozilla's Josh Aas, Mac systems currently make up around 6.6 percent of all Firefox users, including versions of the browser since Firefox 3. Leopard is now four years old, and the prediction by the Mozilla development team is that by the time Firefox 13 is released in June of 2012, the number of users running the operating system who would install it will have dropped to less than 10 percent of the Firefox Mac install base.
In a recent discussion about the support of OS X 10.5 for its popular Firefox Web browser, Mozilla developers have been considering the removal of support for Leopard.
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