Not everyone is keen on the idea, however. Connor was the one who jump-started the conversation earlier this month about dropping support for Windows 2000 and versions of Windows XP prior to Service Pack 2. '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 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 is 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 it is slated for final release before the end of this quarter.

Apple debuted Mac OS X 10.4 in April 2005, then supplanted it with 10.5, a.k.a. Our 10.4 support would end a little over 3 years after the last copy of 10.4 shipped,' said Josh Aas, a platform engineer for Mozilla who works on Mac OS X integration. '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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