Re: Proposal to Drop Support for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)
Colin Barrett
> I have written a proposal for dropping Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) support
> from Gecko 1.9 and I would like to get some feedback from community
> members.
>
> http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddgz99zp_3f7p24k
>
> What do you think? Questions? Comments?
I agree.
All signs indicate that Leopard will be a big release. Tiger has been
out the longest of any OS release (as Apple said when Tiger was put out
in April of 2005, the have slowed down the release cycle to make major
improvements). There are strong indications it will have a vastly
different visual look than Tiger. There are also probably numerous
places where things we currently do don't work correctly or the behavior
changes in the new OS. It's going to mean a bunch more work for us, and
it's work of a scope that is totally unknown, and much of it we may have
to do at the last second.
Another thing I would like to add is that Adium, an alternative IM
client for Mac OS X (that I work on), also has update statistics online
(http://adiumx.com/sparkle). According to those statistics, roughly 5-6%
of users are on 10.3.9. As of this writing, this is roughly the same
number of users as are left on 10.4.8 -- 10.4.9 came out a few weeks ago.
We have been through the decision to drop an OS release with Adium twice
now. There comes a point where the old OS is slowing you down
(development-wise) and preventing you from being competitive. That's
when you know you need to drop the OS. One good litmus? How many of your
community / developer types are using the OS. Right now, neither Josh
nor I have access to a 10.3 machine, despite us trying to load it on our
older PPC PowerBooks (they are too new to load the OS, and they are only
a couple years old). That isn't to say we couldn't *get* such a machine.
The point is that it's fairly old hardware, and those users are probably
not the types to try an alternative browser -- they'll probably just
stick with Safari.
To succeed on the Mac you need to be nimble and fashionable. Josh's work
with native form controls and all the Cocoa port work in general has
gone a long way, and I think with a nice theme and a few "hip" touches,
we can make a big splash with Firefox 3. Dropping 10.3 will help us be
more nimble.
-Colin
Boris Zbarsky
> The point is that it's fairly old hardware, and those users are probably
> not the types to try an alternative browser -- they'll probably just
> stick with Safari.
Unrelated to the decision to drop 10.3, I think this line of argument is
really really odd. Maybe that's because of all the people I know who
will buy a computer with some OS, keep using it (with that OS) for a
while (because upgrades tend to break things), but are happy to
experiment with non-OS software, including browsers. I'm having a hard
time reconciling the statistics being cited with my personal experience,
I guess. :(
-Boris
Robert Sayre
> Colin Barrett wrote:
>> The point is that it's fairly old hardware, and those users are probably
>> not the types to try an alternative browser -- they'll probably just
>> stick with Safari.
>
> Unrelated to the decision to drop 10.3, I think this line of argument is
> really really odd.
That sentence from Colin is the was the only part of the proposal and
accompanying emails I would take issue with, because it is completely
unsubstantiated. It could be correct, but who knows.
I do agree that we shouldn't spend inordinate developer resources on
5-6% of 5-6% of our users. With Linux, we need to be careful because of
the way it overlaps with our developer base (though it doesn't help to
muddle the two).
It's not pleasant to drop support for users that want to use Firefox 3
without paying Apple $100, but engineering is about all about
trade-offs. It doesn't seem like we have the resources to do it all, on
three versions of Mac OS X, and effectively compete with Safari, which
doesn't support older OS X versions for major upgrades.
- Rob, who snidely predicted this day when support for 10.2 was dropped,
and it was promised that 10.3 would be supported for Fx3, but now thinks
we should drop it like a rock
Justin Dolske
> Another thing I would like to add is that Adium, an alternative IM
> client for Mac OS X (that I work on), also has update statistics online
> (http://adiumx.com/sparkle). According to those statistics, roughly 5-6%
> of users are on 10.3.9. As of this writing, this is roughly the same
> number of users as are left on 10.4.8 -- 10.4.9 came out a few weeks ago.
It would be a good idea to see if we (Mozilla) have any stats for what
OS version our OS X users are running. I'm not sure if we collect that
level of detail from downloads/updates, though.
I'd be a little wary of how well the Adium stats correlate with the
actual installed base of OS X.
> Right now, neither Josh
> nor I have access to a 10.3 machine, despite us trying to load it on our
> older PPC PowerBooks (they are too new to load the OS, and they are only
> a couple years old). That isn't to say we couldn't *get* such a machine.
2 years is a long time in the software industry, but not so much for the
rest of the world. I would assume there is still lots of pre-2005
hardware and software being used in schools and homes... It seems
premature to dismiss it as outdated. [Given that upgrading to 10.4 isn't
free, I'd assume most of that hardware is still running the 10.3 it
shipped with.]
That said, if there are a lot of 10.3 users but they're not showing up
in our FF1/FF2 usage stats, then they're probably not relevant for FF3.
> To succeed on the Mac you need to be nimble and fashionable. Josh's work
> with native form controls and all the Cocoa port work in general has
> gone a long way, and I think with a nice theme and a few "hip" touches,
> we can make a big splash with Firefox 3. Dropping 10.3 will help us be
> more nimble.
I'm a little wary about this part as well... We're rapidly approaching
the first FF3 beta, which is supposed to be feature complete. Dropping
support for an OS is usually due to core, fundamental issues -- so it
seems rather late in the game to be talking about that.
I can see dropping 10.3 being a win for getting us there faster and
reducing testing requirements, though.
Justin
Chris Hofmann
Justin Dolske wrote:
> Colin Barrett wrote:
>
>
>> Another thing I would like to add is that Adium, an alternative IM
>> client for Mac OS X (that I work on), also has update statistics online
>> (http://adiumx.com/sparkle). According to those statistics, roughly 5-6%
>> of users are on 10.3.9. As of this writing, this is roughly the same
>> number of users as are left on 10.4.8 -- 10.4.9 came out a few weeks ago.
>>
>
> It would be a good idea to see if we (Mozilla) have any stats for what
> OS version our OS X users are running. I'm not sure if we collect that
> level of detail from downloads/updates, though.
>
we should be able to dig this data out. there are some problems
currently with the loging and reporting system so it might be a few days.
generally the places that report Mac OS version info like
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
don't provide as much detail about OSX versions as they do for windows.
chris h.
Boris Zbarsky
> 2 years is a long time in the software industry, but not so much for the
> rest of the world. I would assume there is still lots of pre-2005
> hardware and software being used in schools and homes.
Amen. That's exactly what I see when I look at what non-technical
non-early-adopter users (you recall, the folks we want to expand Firefox
market share with) are using.
> That said, if there are a lot of 10.3 users but they're not showing up
> in our FF1/FF2 usage stats, then they're probably not relevant for FF3.
If you assume that we're not trying to expand our market share in this
segment, then yes. Are we making that assumption?
(I'm not saying it's a bad assumption; I just want us to be conscious
that we're making it.)
> I can see dropping 10.3 being a win for getting us there faster and
> reducing testing requirements, though.
That's really what the whole thing is about -- lack of resources. I'm
really pretty unhappy with us dropping OS X 10.3 (because a number of
people I've only recently converted to Firefox are using it), but I can
see why we might have to do it given the date constraints on our Gecko
1.9 release. :(
-Boris
Boris Zbarsky
> I'm really pretty unhappy with us dropping OS X 10.3
To clarify, that's with my evangelist hat on. As a sometimes Mac user
who doesn't use 10.3 himself and wants Firefox to work well on 10.4, I
like the idea, of course. :(
-Boris
Axel Hecht
Hooking up my question randomly here:
Given how old the hardware to run 10.3 had to be, how likely is it that
just paying a few 100 bucks is going to make that run 10.4 or .5?
Like, I only know about the hardware requirements evolution on windows
releases, and linux, to some extent. If OSX is only halfway close, we're
not asking users to upgrade their OS, but their hardware.
Axel
Mike Shaver
> To succeed on the Mac you need to be nimble and fashionable. Josh's work
> with native form controls and all the Cocoa port work in general has
> gone a long way, and I think with a nice theme and a few "hip" touches,
> we can make a big splash with Firefox 3. Dropping 10.3 will help us be
> more nimble.
Let's talk about this with more detail, because I'm sympathetic to the
economic argument, especially given our scarce Mac hacking resources,
but I think we need to be more deliberate about it than just pursuit
of fashion and general nimbleness.
Which of the planned Gecko 1.9 features (blockers and otherwise) are
hard to do on 10.3? How much longer, roughly, would they take to do
in a 10.3-compatible way? Which parts of the feature would become
infeasible due to missing needed support in the OS? That information
will help us make a more widely-informed decision about the cost part
of the equation, I think.
Also: what is Apple's own support lifecycle for operating systems?
Will people still be getting security updates for 10.3 when Fx 3
ships, say in Q4 of this year?
Mike
Marcia Knous
As many of you know, I still run 10.3 on my laptop, mostly to catch PPC
bugs since everyone in the QA team runs Intel Mac with 10.4.x. I don't
buy the argument that if devs aren't using it, it isn't being used by
the community - in fact, Josh and others know I routinely raise issues
on 10.3 just so he doesn't have to run it (Do any of the Windows devs
run Win 98 or 2K - no, but we still support it). I would like to see
some other data to really get a sense of how many users are out there.
In the past I have been asking marketing to see if they can get us some
data on how many 10.3 users we actually have, but I have not gotten
anything. More data would be useful.
And as shaver says, more information about specific features that would
be hard to do on 10.3 (and are there any workarounds?) as well as
Apple's own support lifecycle would be helpful data to have.
I want to have a kick-ass Firefox 3 that makes Safari quake in its
boots, but I also don't want to dismiss the loyal Firefox users that
still may be using 10.3. We should definitely try to get some of the
data posters have asked about.
Robert Kaiser
> 2 years is a long time in the software industry, but not so much for the
> rest of the world. I would assume there is still lots of pre-2005
> hardware and software being used in schools and homes... It seems
> premature to dismiss it as outdated. [Given that upgrading to 10.4 isn't
> free, I'd assume most of that hardware is still running the 10.3 it
> shipped with.]
Not only schools and home, but esp. also businesses. Around here, for
example, as a business, you only can deduce taxes for a computer over
its expected lifetime, which is standardized to 4 years by law. Which
means, if a business upgrades its computers faster than every 4 years,
it might more or less lose parts of tax deductions - and 2 years are
only half of that time!
It's one thing to drop Win9x when Win2k debuted in 2000 and XP in 2001,
or to drop GTK1 when GTK2 was released in 2002, but asking users of
computers that are two years old (or only slightly older) to upgrade
their hardware seems a bit drastic. And I'm not sure how much of the
10.3 hardware can still run with Tiger (if Apple even still sells Tiger,
and not just Jaguar).
I guess the real question is how much overhead 10.3 support is actually.
Oh, and BTW, I think our main Mac developer (mostly doing UI stuff only
though) in the SeaMonkey project, Stefan Hermes (stefanh on IRC), still
has 10.3.9 available.
Robert Kaiser
Robert Accettura
> Justin Dolske schrieb:
>> 2 years is a long time in the software industry, but not so much for the
>> rest of the world. I would assume there is still lots of pre-2005
>> hardware and software being used in schools and homes... It seems
>> premature to dismiss it as outdated. [Given that upgrading to 10.4 isn't
>> free, I'd assume most of that hardware is still running the 10.3 it
>> shipped with.]
>
For the record the original Mac Mini (1.42GHz G4) shipped with 10.3
(towards the end of 10.3's life). So there are still pretty modern PowerPC
based systems running 10.3. I'm almost positive G5's also shipped with
10.3. Odds are most of those are still in active use, and likely running
10.3.
> It's one thing to drop Win9x when Win2k debuted in 2000 and XP in 2001,
> or to drop GTK1 when GTK2 was released in 2002, but asking users of
> computers that are two years old (or only slightly older) to upgrade
> their hardware seems a bit drastic. And I'm not sure how much of the
> 10.3 hardware can still run with Tiger (if Apple even still sells Tiger,
> and not just Jaguar).
>
Agreed. Though one should differentiate between hardware and software.
Tiger (10.4) does support my B&W G3 (400MHz) from 1999. As a general rule
Apple supports hardware for at least 4 years. Here's a list of hardware
supported (officially) in 10.4:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.html
So upgrading hardware is a bit of a stretch. Anyone likely running Firefox
has the adequate hardware, they just need an OS update. For businesses,
this is more problematic because of multiple licenses, IT testing
compatibility, and OS rollouts aren't exactly easy... hence many stall as
long as possible.
That said, I personally think it's to early to drop 10.3 support. It
shipped to recently and on relatively modern hardware. Unless there's a
real lack of resources, or large overhead, I don't think it's a great
choice.
> I guess the real question is how much overhead 10.3 support is actually.
>
This is the BIG question.
--
Robert Accettura
rob...@accettura.com
Mike Beltzner
> It's one thing to drop Win9x when Win2k debuted in 2000 and XP in
> 2001,
> or to drop GTK1 when GTK2 was released in 2002, but asking users of
> computers that are two years old (or only slightly older) to upgrade
> their hardware seems a bit drastic. And I'm not sure how much of the
> 10.3 hardware can still run with Tiger (if Apple even still sells
> Tiger,
> and not just Jaguar).
We're running around in circles here without any data, and it's not
really getting us anywhere. I could, for instance, argue from
anecdotal evidence that OSX users tend to refresh their OS far more
frequently than Windows users. Seems true, and feels true in my gut,
so by Colbert's Maxim, it must be right! :)
> I guess the real question is how much overhead 10.3 support is
> actually.
It's a question of balance, and the right questions have already been
asked:
- what is the overhead pain of 10.3 support (in terms of
development and QA)
- what is the expected lifecycle of 10.3 as stated by Apple?
- what is the expected uptake of 10.4 and when is it planned on
being released?
Right now it feels premature to me to ditch 10.3 support if our
release of Firefox 3 is planned within the same year as the 10.4
release, but let's work on getting some answers.
cheers,
mike
Stefan Hermes
>> with native form controls and all the Cocoa port work in general has
>> gone a long way, and I think with a nice theme and a few "hip" touches,
>> we can make a big splash with Firefox 3. Dropping 10.3 will help us be
>> more nimble.
>>
>
> economic argument, especially given our scarce Mac hacking resources,
> but I think we need to be more deliberate about it than just pursuit
> of fashion and general nimbleness.
>
> Which of the planned Gecko 1.9 features (blockers and otherwise) are
> hard to do on 10.3? How much longer, roughly, would they take to do
> in a 10.3-compatible way? Which parts of the feature would become
> infeasible due to missing needed support in the OS? That information
> will help us make a more widely-informed decision about the cost part
> of the equation, I think.
>
> Also: what is Apple's own support lifecycle for operating systems?
> Will people still be getting security updates for 10.3 when Fx 3
> ships, say in Q4 of this year?
>
> Mike
>
(last one was 1 May).
/Stefan
John
well, i think 10.4 has been out since the end of April 2005, and it's
actually 10.5 that's the upcoming release (now slated for november).
10.3 was released in October 2003.
my own anecdotal experience would suggest that folks who bought their
machines in the first half of 2005 even (which would include both my
mother & my mother-in-law) are still running 10.3, as it would have
required some proactive activity on their part to make it different.
(i'm such a lousy son & son-in-law that i haven't gone to upgrade them
yet. holding out for 10.5.)
while far from being actual data, i suggest that there are an awful
lot of folks who never shelled out for 10.4.
Mike Connor
On 23-May-07, at 6:27 AM, Mike Shaver wrote:
> Also: what is Apple's own support lifecycle for operating systems?
> Will people still be getting security updates for 10.3 when Fx 3
> ships, say in Q4 of this year?
I'm going to get even more aggressive on the subject:
Do we want to support a platform that the vendor has dropped security
updates for? I would assert that we do not. We've historically
dropped platforms as they hit end of life.
Do we want to support platforms that are about to be dropped shortly
before/after targeted release dates? I would assert that we don't
want to do this either (Firefox 3, if released in November, will be
supported until May 2009, so thinking only about ship date is a
little short-sighted).
From an IRC conversation with Josh, it seems fairly likely that
Apple will drop support for OS X 10.3 at the end of this year. Given
that Firefox 2 will continue to be supported until at least six
months after Firefox 3 ships, I think we will have the 10.3 holdouts
covered longer than Apple, and I think that's all we should
realistically plan to do.
-- Mike
Christopher Aillon
> Given how old the hardware to run 10.3 had to be, how likely is it that
> just paying a few 100 bucks is going to make that run 10.4 or .5?
I asked some friends who work for a Mac repair/reseller shop, and they
follow this sort of stuff rather closely. G4s will in general run
10.4.0 no problem, however Apple put in a hard shut-off even for some of
these in the 10.4.7-ish time frame, so OSes newer than that would not
work on some G4 hardware. The G3 will not run 10.4 at all without
modding, and since laptops ran about a year behind the desktops, some
people do still have G3 laptops that are functional machines for them.
Most people are on G4 or newer, though if they are still on a G4 or G3
with 10.3, chances are they aren't going to install a new OS: they're
waiting for a hardware upgrade to do so. Asking them to upgrade their
OS really is asking them to upgrade their hardware.
Mike Beltzner
> well, i think 10.4 has been out since the end of April 2005, and it's
> actually 10.5 that's the upcoming release (now slated for november).
> 10.3 was released in October 2003.
Whoops - yeah, sorry, I got my numbers wrong there ;)
cheers,
mike
jos...@gmail.com
> Which of the planned Gecko 1.9 features (blockers and otherwise) are
> hard to do on 10.3? How much longer, roughly, would they take to do
> in a 10.3-compatible way? Which parts of the feature would become
> infeasible due to missing needed support in the OS? That information
> will help us make a more widely-informed decision about the cost part
> of the equation, I think.
At least most of that information is in my original proposal.
> Also: what is Apple's own support lifecycle for operating systems?
> Will people still be getting security updates for 10.3 when Fx 3
> ships, say in Q4 of this year?
That is definitely in my original proposal. Colin's post is a response
to that, please read the original.
Samuel Sidler
> Do we want to support platforms that are about to be dropped shortly
> before/after targeted release dates? I would assert that we don't want
> to do this either (Firefox 3, if released in November, will be supported
> until May 2009, so thinking only about ship date is a little
> short-sighted).
We're making this assumption that Apple will drop support. It's a fair
assumption, to be sure, but it's an assumption nonetheless. Has Apple
officially said that they'll be dropping support?
-Sam
Boris Zbarsky
> From an IRC conversation with Josh, it seems fairly likely that Apple
> will drop support for OS X 10.3 at the end of this year.
Out of curiosity, when did they drop 10.2 support? I just tried to find
that information and failed...
-Boris
jos...@gmail.com
10.3 users after this year. They'll stop around the time we ship Gecko
1.9. I can't find an official position on that but I don't recall
finding one on 10.2 either.
Secondly, on the hardware/software upgrade issue, users don't *have*
to run Firefox 3 just like they don't *have* to run Mac OS X 10.4. If
you really want Firefox 3 for some compelling reason you can get it -
install 10.4. But there are other good browsers for 10.3, like Firefox
2 which we're all so fond of. Your mother in laws wouldn't be getting
left in the cold by us any more than they would be by Apple.
smorgan
impact on Camino development.
On May 23, 8:32 am, John <john.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> while far from being actual data, i suggest that there are an awful
> lot of folks who never shelled out for 10.4.
There's no question that there are people that are running 10.3 who
cannot or will not upgrade (heck, Camino's feedback list gets requests
for an OS 9 version every month or two), and I don't think there's any
question that we would like to continue to support them in an ideal
world. We've always made a real effort to support older OS versions
for Camino for as long as we reasonably can. All other things being
equal, we'd much rather have the option of supporting 10.3 for Camino
2.0 (when we will be picking up Gecko 1.9).
However, all other things aren't equal; Gecko 1.9 is a huge overhaul
of major parts of the tree. 10.3 has already caused problems in the
printing rewrite, in places touched by Cairo changes, and now in the
widget rewrite that will substantially improve the feel of 1.9 on OS
X. There are still substantial bugs that need to be resolved to make
1.9 solid, and I'm in agreement with Josh that given the limited
resources, spending time on the 10.3-only bugs that have resulted is
probably not realistic at this point.
If it were just a case of "let's drop 10.3 to make our lives a little
easier" I wouldn't be for it, but looking at the bug lists the
question I see is "is it worth sacrificing overall quality of 1.9 to
continue to support 10.3", and I think the answer there should be
"no", as unfortunate as that is.
-Stuart
smorgan
impact on Camino development.
On May 23, 8:32 am, John <john.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> while far from being actual data, i suggest that there are an awful
> lot of folks who never shelled out for 10.4.
There's no question that there are people that are running 10.3 who
John
yep, totally right. fair enough. but our basic plan is to do security
updates for fx2 for 6 months past the release of fx3, right? so that
puts us into middle of 2008, or about 3 years after 10.4 was released.
that's probably okay.
Mike Shaver
> That is definitely in my original proposal. Colin's post is a response
> to that, please read the original.
Sorry, yeah, I missed the summarization of the set of hard cases for
Panther. (I almost pasted your google doc here in my reply, so that
it would be in the thread for quoting and direct discussion, but that
seemed a little passive-aggressive!)
It sounds like the investment is pretty heavy, given our constraints
on the platform. I'd vote in support of dropping Panther support
passively for now: deblocking the Panther-only bugs, but not removing
existing Panther-around code, in case a motivated advocate arrives in
time to buy Panther one more release. (I would set "in time" as being
around b1, if I had to pick a time.)
I'm not sure that not being left in the cold by Apple is exactly the
benchmark to use -- they have a vested interest in having people pay
for new software and hardware, and we have a vested interest in having
as many users as feasible upgrade to our newer software -- but it's a
valuable data point to be sure, especially since it limits our ability
to support those users well. (We won't be able to effectively protect
them from security problems on their platform, f.e.)
Mike
Colin Barrett
> On 23 May 2007 08:58:12 -0700, jos...@gmail.com <jos...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> That is definitely in my original proposal. Colin's post is a response
>> to that, please read the original.
>
> Sorry, yeah, I missed the summarization of the set of hard cases for
> Panther. (I almost pasted your google doc here in my reply, so that
> it would be in the thread for quoting and direct discussion, but that
> seemed a little passive-aggressive!)
Sorry about that, that was my fault entirely for replying with the wrong
header. Sorry if this caused any confusion! Please read Josh's original
proposal, here's the URL again:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddgz99zp_3f7p24k
It is well written and contains a lot I didn't mention in my reply.
> It sounds like the investment is pretty heavy, given our constraints
> on the platform. I'd vote in support of dropping Panther support
> passively for now: deblocking the Panther-only bugs, but not removing
> existing Panther-around code, in case a motivated advocate arrives in
> time to buy Panther one more release. (I would set "in time" as being
> around b1, if I had to pick a time.)
The investment is pretty heavy, and I would really like to point out
that a new OS is shipping a month or so before we release. We *are*
getting "feature complete betas," in a few weeks at WWDC, which will be
the first time we actually know everything that's going to be in Leopard
-- last year they told us our seeds were incomplete and there were still
"secret features."
Leopard compatibility, and devoting enough resources to it, is something
I'm personally very worried about. We really have no idea what is in
Leopard right now -- we'll have a better idea in a couple weeks, but
until the OS ships (a month before we do), we will be working against a
moving target. It is entirely possible that there will be a lot of work
to do at the very last second to get Firefox to work properly on 10.5.
Having to make sure we don't break 10.3 will, and has, cost us valuable
days and weeks.
If the 10.4 adoption rates are indicative, a year after the release ~50%
of Mac OS X users will be on the new OS. It's also highly likely that
will be quicker since there has not been an OS release in a while and
(from what I've heard), there will be significant UI changes, which
(assuming Apple creates something desirable) will drive sales further.
> I'm not sure that not being left in the cold by Apple is exactly the
> benchmark to use -- they have a vested interest in having people pay
> for new software and hardware, and we have a vested interest in having
> as many users as feasible upgrade to our newer software -- but it's a
> valuable data point to be sure, especially since it limits our ability
> to support those users well. (We won't be able to effectively protect
> them from security problems on their platform, f.e.)
Again, 10.3 users will still have Firefox 2, which we will be supporting
for a while.
This is, in part, a mention of resources. But as the platform evolves,
there are features that we want to deliver to our users (see Josh's
proposal for some more details) that we just cannot do on 10.3.
The engineering effort for 10.3 is large enough that it is becoming a
burden to development that affects the vast majority of our users. Josh
has some great examples in his original proposal, please read them.
-Colin
Robert Kaiser
> And I'm not sure how much of the
> 10.3 hardware can still run with Tiger (if Apple even still sells Tiger,
> and not just Jaguar).
Sorry, typo:
s/Jaguar/Leopard/
It's easy to confuse all those cats. ;-)
Robert Kaiser
Robert Kaiser
> It's a question of balance, and the right questions have already been
> asked:
>
> - what is the overhead pain of 10.3 support (in terms of development
> and QA)
> - what is the expected lifecycle of 10.3 as stated by Apple?
> - what is the expected uptake of 10.4 and when is it planned on being
> released?
>
> Right now it feels premature to me to ditch 10.3 support if our release
> of Firefox 3 is planned within the same year as the 10.4 release, but
> let's work on getting some answers.
Exactly - just with s/10.4/10.5/ (as stated somewhere else in that
thread already - just not threaded correctly in the ng)
Robert Kaiser
Robert Kaiser
> I'm going to get even more aggressive on the subject:
>
> Do we want to support a platform that the vendor has dropped security
> updates for? I would assert that we do not. We've historically dropped
> platforms as they hit end of life.
> Do we want to support platforms that are about to be dropped shortly
> before/after targeted release dates? I would assert that we don't want
> to do this either (Firefox 3, if released in November, will be supported
> until May 2009, so thinking only about ship date is a little
> short-sighted).
Umm, so we should drop Win2k and XP SP1 as well? I heard there may no
security updates for those any more - or did I get that incorrectly?
And why does FF2 even support any Win9x version when security support
has been dropped way before FF2 shipped?
I'm not sure this is the way to go, even though I see the reasoning
behind it.
Robert Kaiser
Boris Zbarsky
> Secondly, on the hardware/software upgrade issue, users don't *have*
> to run Firefox 3
Realistically, we expect Firefox 3 to provide a better user experience
than Firefox 2, right? And we want our users to have this better
experience?
And as time goes on and web sites make more use of the Firefox 3 core
features, the disparity will grow. So the users who can't upgrade and
keep getting told by web sites that their browser sucks (in possibly mor
polite terms) will feel more and more unhappy. Which is bad, given the
way that our viral marketing thing works.
With any luck, the time it will take for web sites to really start
discriminating against Firefox 2 will be large enough that it won't
matter. Our best advertising last I checked is really happy mother in
laws telling all their friends about this thing their daughter in law
installed for them. ;)
> Your mother in laws wouldn't be getting left in the cold by us any
> more than they would be by Apple.
That's a pretty low bar, really. Apple has strong incentives to leave
people in the cold so they have to upgrade.
-Boris
Chris Hofmann
Chris Hofmann wrote:
> Justin Dolske wrote:
>
>> Colin Barrett wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Another thing I would like to add is that Adium, an alternative IM
>>> client for Mac OS X (that I work on), also has update statistics online
>>> (http://adiumx.com/sparkle). According to those statistics, roughly 5-6%
>>> of users are on 10.3.9. As of this writing, this is roughly the same
>>> number of users as are left on 10.4.8 -- 10.4.9 came out a few weeks ago.
>>>
>>>
>> It would be a good idea to see if we (Mozilla) have any stats for what
>> OS version our OS X users are running. I'm not sure if we collect that
>> level of detail from downloads/updates, though.
>>
>>
> we should be able to dig this data out. there are some problems
> currently with the loging and reporting system so it might be a few days.
>
> generally the places that report Mac OS version info like
> http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
> don't provide as much detail about OSX versions as they do for windows.
>
>
Apache logs don't seem to be much help in analyzing mac version info.
Here is about all we can get out of the user agent
For mozilla.org traffic yeseterday Mac traffic made up about 8% or
186000 page views. Those page views were distributed among the following
48% PPC Mac OS X Mach-O
32% Intel Mac OS X
12% PPC Mac OS X
6% PPC
Just looking at Safari page views might help. Can these webkit version
numbers be roughly associated with OS releases? And can that iphone
tester that is hitting mozilla.org please identify who you are? ;-)
17749 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419
9790 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419
3652 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
2211 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
1012 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
933 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
872 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9
745 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/419
632 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.8.5
575 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.8
534 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418
479 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9
450 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/419
362 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418
334 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412
324 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/419
314 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.8
309 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/417.9
306 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; ja-jp) AppleWebKit/419
278 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/416.11
268 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.1
217 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; ja-jp) AppleWebKit/419
205 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.6
204 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.8
177 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/103u
168 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/420+
166 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/417.9
161 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/419
157 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.2
106 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.6
93 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85
76 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/412.7
75 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.4
72 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/418.9
72 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/418.8
69 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/419
67 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/312.8
67 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/522+
63 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5
60 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
59 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/419
59 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; zh-cn) AppleWebKit/419
59 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/124
58 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
56 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/522+
54 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/419
52 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419.3
50 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.7
49 SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413
46 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; fr) AppleWebKit/419
46 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/85.8.5
46 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; fr) AppleWebKit/419
45 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7
44 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/312.1
44 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/106.2
43 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/103u
41 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/418.9
41 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; af-za) AppleWebKit/419
39 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
37 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.4
37 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/418.9
35 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
34 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.6.2
34 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419.2
33 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X;) AppleWebKit/412.7
33 iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+
32 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
32 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/418.9
32 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5
32 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; bg-bg) AppleWebKit/312.1
30 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/418.9
30 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/312.1
30 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; ko-kr) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
29 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/412.6
29 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/416.11
29 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/416.12
29 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.5
29 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
28 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/312.5
28 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/419
28 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/419
> chris h.
> _______________________________________________
> dev-planning mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-planning
>
Ray Kiddy
> Mike Shaver skriver:
>> On 5/22/07, Colin Barrett <cbar...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>
>>> To succeed on the Mac you need to be nimble and fashionable. Josh's work
>>> with native form controls and all the Cocoa port work in general has
>>> gone a long way, and I think with a nice theme and a few "hip" touches,
>>> we can make a big splash with Firefox 3. Dropping 10.3 will help us be
>>> more nimble.
>>>
>>
>> Let's talk about this with more detail, because I'm sympathetic to the
>> economic argument, especially given our scarce Mac hacking resources,
>> but I think we need to be more deliberate about it than just pursuit
>> of fashion and general nimbleness.
>>
>> Which of the planned Gecko 1.9 features (blockers and otherwise) are
>> hard to do on 10.3? How much longer, roughly, would they take to do
>> in a 10.3-compatible way? Which parts of the feature would become
>> infeasible due to missing needed support in the OS? That information
>> will help us make a more widely-informed decision about the cost part
>> of the equation, I think.
>>
>> Will people still be getting security updates for 10.3 when Fx 3
>> ships, say in Q4 of this year?
>>
>>
> For the record: Apple still delivers security updates to 10.3.9 users
> (last one was 1 May).
>
> /Stefan
This is true. Just be aware there are different levels of "support" at
work here.
One level of support is "we will be doing new things with this" and "we
will help you will problems with this" and another is "we will give you
(only) what we are legally required to give you".
The security updates are from the latter.
- ray
Ray Kiddy
Here is one indicator.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75421
The last software update for 10.2 was released December 2, 2004.
If you are looking for Apple to put "we do not support <whatever>" on a
web page, I do not think they ever will. If it is negative, they just do
not say the words. If the answer is positive, they say something.
More information (and assorted rants) on Apple's legal viewpoints and
practices available upon request.
- ray
Boris Zbarsky
> The last software update for 10.2 was released December 2, 2004.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300770 is Jan 25, 2005
(according to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798) and
includes 10.2.8 updates, no?
> If you are looking for Apple to put "we do not support <whatever>" on a
> web page, I do not think they ever will.
I see. That makes it really hard to tell whether they've dropped
support, huh?
-Boris
Eddie-MacG3
10.4 released: APR 2005
10.2 EOL: ~DEC 2005
Overlap: ~8 months
Extrapolating:
10.5 expected: ~NOV 2007 (hmm, ~Ff3 expected, too)
10.3 EOL: ~JUN 2008 (hmm, ~Ff2 EOL, too)
I still run OSX 10.3.9 on a Blue G3.
I use SeaMonkey (1.1.2.RC.09-May-2007)
and sometimes Ff (2.0.0.4.RC.3)
and maybe Camino (1.5.RC.2).
Given the above OSX 10.x release/EOL realities,
and the quality of the latest Gecko 1.8.1 based RCs,
I would be OK with Ff3 EOLing/discontinuing
10.3 support in sync with Apple.
Thank you,
Eddie
smorgan
> Can these webkit version numbers be roughly associated with OS releases?
They can: 4xx is 10.4, 1xx-3xx is 10.3, so about 15% of that listing
is 10.3.
Mike Pinkerton
>
> If the 10.4 adoption rates are indicative, a year after the release ~50%
> of Mac OS X users will be on the new OS. It's also highly likely that
> will be quicker since there has not been an OS release in a while and
> (from what I've heard), there will be significant UI changes, which
> (assuming Apple creates something desirable) will drive sales further.
We made similar assumptions about Tiger about 2yrs ago at AOL, thinking "oh,
Panther (10.3) was such a lame upgrade, most people skipped it and will
flock to Tiger in droves. Well, years later, we still have the same 50%
adoption after 1yr curve. I don't think we should assume that it'll be any
different here, though we'd love to think so.
One other thing that hasn't really been mentioned here is that our products
are an alternative to Safari. We fill a gap (web compatibility, extensions,
"not safari", works on older OS versions) and cutting out the users that
want that choice on older OS's seems to go against our core user base. Most
people will just use Safari, the others choose us for a reason, let's not
give them less reason. In the past for Camino, we got sizable kudos for
continuing to work on older OS's when Apple had abandoned them. Maybe it was
only a few users, but the good-will spreads to everyone involved.
-Pink
Colin Barrett
> On 5/23/07, Colin Barrett <cbar...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>
>> If the 10.4 adoption rates are indicative, a year after the release ~50%
>> of Mac OS X users will be on the new OS. It's also highly likely that
>> will be quicker since there has not been an OS release in a while and
>> (from what I've heard), there will be significant UI changes, which
>> (assuming Apple creates something desirable) will drive sales further.
>
>
> We made similar assumptions about Tiger about 2yrs ago at AOL, thinking
> "oh,
> Panther (10.3) was such a lame upgrade, most people skipped it and will
> flock to Tiger in droves. Well, years later, we still have the same 50%
> adoption after 1yr curve. I don't think we should assume that it'll be any
> different here, though we'd love to think so.
Even 50% adoption 1 year out is still very significant, and means that
10.5 will very very quickly eclipse 10.3 in marketshare.
> One other thing that hasn't really been mentioned here is that our products
> are an alternative to Safari. We fill a gap (web compatibility, extensions,
> "not safari", works on older OS versions) and cutting out the users that
> want that choice on older OS's seems to go against our core user base. Most
> people will just use Safari, the others choose us for a reason, let's not
> give them less reason. In the past for Camino, we got sizable kudos for
> continuing to work on older OS's when Apple had abandoned them. Maybe it
> was
> only a few users, but the good-will spreads to everyone involved.
This is, as Josh said, a question of resources. We have limited set of
people to do the work that needs to get done, and we need to make some
choices about what's going to get done.
Should we support 10.3 users at the exclusion of better support for
users of 10.4 and 10.5? That is the question at hand. (If I at all
suggested something else, I apologize).
-Colin
Boris Zbarsky
> Maybe it was
> only a few users, but the good-will spreads to everyone involved.
This is sort of the point I was trying to make. We should realize that
the impact of dropping users is a lot bigger than just the users dropped.
But I still don't have a way for us to do 1.9 in the time limit we have
set ourselves with the current resources, with decent quality, with 10.3
support. :(
-Boris
Boris Zbarsky
> 10.2 EOL: ~DEC 2005
A few things I want to know about that date:
1) How do we know that's when 10.2 went EOL?
2) Do the users know that?
3) Will 10.3 users know that they are EOL, and that's why we're
dropping them?
I feel that the perception here is important, and we don't want the
perception to be "Firefox dropped us" as much as "Apple dropped us", I
would think...
-Boris
Robert Sayre
> In the past for Camino, we got sizable kudos for continuing to work
> on older OS's when Apple had abandoned them. Maybe it was only a few
> users, but the good-will spreads to everyone involved.
This comment does not address the trade-off that is being presented.
Everyone agrees that dropping support for 10.3 could result in upset
users. However, we need to pick between three choices. Here's a survey:
[1] Ship a high-quality product for 10.4 and 10.5
[2] Ship a lower-quality product for 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5
[3] ___________________ will provide the resources to fix Panther
bugs so that we can ship a high-quality product on 10.3, 10.4,
and 10.5
Does anyone believe this is a false choice? I want to pick door #1.
- Rob
Colin Barrett
> Eddie-MacG3 wrote:
>> 10.2 EOL: ~DEC 2005
>
> A few things I want to know about that date:
>
> 1) How do we know that's when 10.2 went EOL?
I believe that is when the update of any kind shipped for 10.2
> 2) Do the users know that?
Following Ray's observation, I would say generally no. I would assert
that in fact believe they are supported far shorter than Apple actually
supports them -- I would guess that the average user would tend to think
that Apple only supports the current release of Mac OS X. I only have
anecdotal evidence to support that claim, but I think it's pretty
reasonable.
> 3) Will 10.3 users know that they are EOL, and that's why we're
> dropping them?
Apple generally won't notify them that they are no longer supported, but
the new version of the OS and the lack of anything appearing in Software
Update might give them the impression that Apple has moved on.
> I feel that the perception here is important, and we don't want the
> perception to be "Firefox dropped us" as much as "Apple dropped us", I
> would think...
Ideally, we would love to support these users as much as we could, but
as Rob Sayre pointed out, we do not have the engineering resources to do so.
-Colin
Boris Zbarsky
> Does anyone believe this is a false choice?
As presented, yes. I believe more accurate choices would be:
[1] Ship a high-quality product for 10.4 and 10.5 in Nov 2007.
[2] Ship a lower-quality product than in [1] for 10.3, 10.4,
and 10.5 in Nov 2007.
[3] Shop a ? quality product for 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 in ?.
[4] ___________________ will provide the resources to fix Panther
bugs so that we can ship a high-quality product on 10.3, 10.4,
and 10.5 in Nov 2007.
I'd be interested in the values of the two question marks in choice 3.
If we decide we want to support 10.3 in 1.9 no matter what, how much of
a schedule slip does that represent? A month? A year?
If there is a chance that it's not that big a projected slip, it might
be worth focusing on the 10.4/10.5 blockers now, leave the existing 10.3
code, and then work on 10.3 issues if (or rather when) the 1.9 schedule
slips due to some other part of the code. If we get 10.3 into good
shape before ship, we ship it. If we don't, we can have a discussion
about how the not-quite-perfect Firefox 3 on 10.3 compares to Firefox 2
on 10.3 at that point.
Note that I'm not suggesting we slip for 10.3 per se, just that we take
advantage of slips, if they happen, to work on 10.3 issues. That does
mean having 10.4/10.5 stuff wrapped up on time, though.
-Boris
Robert Sayre
> Robert Sayre wrote:
>> Does anyone believe this is a false choice?
>
> As presented, yes. I believe more accurate choices would be:
>
>
> [1] Ship a high-quality product for 10.4 and 10.5 in Nov 2007.
>
> [2] Ship a lower-quality product than in [1] for 10.3, 10.4,
> and 10.5 in Nov 2007.
>
> [3] Shop a ? quality product for 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 in ?.
>
> [4] ___________________ will provide the resources to fix Panther
> bugs so that we can ship a high-quality product on 10.3, 10.4,
> and 10.5 in Nov 2007.
>
> I'd be interested in the values of the two question marks in choice 3.
> If we decide we want to support 10.3 in 1.9 no matter what, how much of
> a schedule slip does that represent? A month? A year?
OK, I can accept those choices. Choice #3 is not appealing to me,
because the more we slip, the less relevant 10.3 is, and I am assuming
that small amounts of slippage will not be a big enough window to fix 10.3.
- Rob
Robert Kaiser
> Note that I'm not suggesting we slip for 10.3 per se, just that we take
> advantage of slips, if they happen, to work on 10.3 issues.
Well, actually, from where we stand at the moment, it's hard to beleive
we could get a final of Gecko 1.9 stabilized until November or even in
2007. But then, we still have 6 months to go, who knows what this
awesome community can achieve in that time...
Robert Kaiser
Boris Zbarsky
> OK, I can accept those choices. Choice #3 is not appealing to me,
> because the more we slip, the less relevant 10.3 is, and I am assuming
> that small amounts of slippage will not be a big enough window to fix 10.3.
Right. Again, I'm not saying we should slip for 10.3. I'm saying we
shouldn't go out of our way to break 10.3 and see what things look like
in terms of Mac resources and priorities when we slip.
-Boris
Eddie-MacG3
perhaps, a deprecated mode?
That is, continue supporting legacy functionality
from Ff2-OSX10.3,
plus whatever new features from Ff3-OSX10.4/10.5
that can be easily supported in Ff3-OSX10.3
given developer availability and technical feasibility?
Eddie
Boris Zbarsky
> That is, continue supporting legacy functionality
> from Ff2-OSX10.3,
> plus whatever new features from Ff3-OSX10.4/10.5
> that can be easily supported in Ff3-OSX10.3
> given developer availability and technical feasibility?
Given the intedependencies between the various parts of layout, this
would be pretty hard, I think. For example, some of the regression
fixes for reflow branch depend on the new textframe, which depends on
cairo, which depends on Cocoa widgets. These last two are what it
sounded like the issues with 10.3 were.
-Boris
Smokey Ardisson
Groups ate half of this thread during the day (some of the posts I
read this morning seem no longer to exist), and part of the discussion
is still over in m.d.platform, but anyway.... Shaver's post will
work.
On May 23, 6:27 am, "Mike Shaver" <mike.sha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Which of the planned Gecko 1.9 features (blockers and otherwise) are
> hard to do on 10.3? How much longer, roughly, would they take to do
> in a 10.3-compatible way? Which parts of the feature would become
> infeasible due to missing needed support in the OS? That information
> will help us make a more widely-informed decision about the cost part
> of the equation, I think.
So, I'm not an engineer, but as far as I understand, there's this one
bug where you have to do something slightly ugly that still works
(NSImage vs CGImage or whatever for buttons; bug 379640), one bug
where you could conceivably just make some icons not draw on 10.3 for
a very, very lightly degraded experience (bug 363574; I believe mento
did this in at least one revision of his patch for icons-in-menus for
Fx2), and scrollbars (bug 377225, but they're broken in many ways that
aren't 10.3-specific, too, by a quick glance at the Widget:Cocoa
buglist). I'm sure there are a couple more bugs out there I'm not
aware of, but these cover the specific examples mentioned in the
Proposal. Other than scrollbars, I'm trying to understand which of
these things will be so time consuming and costly (again, as a non-
developer, but one who has spent a good deal of time observing Mac dev
in Moz).
Smokey
Eddie-MacG3
> ... For example, some of the regression fixes for reflow branch
> depend on the new textframe, which
> depends on cairo, which
> depends on Cocoa widgets.
> These last two are what it sounded like the issues with 10.3 were.>
> -Boris
I, myself, filed an Ff2 reflow-related bug which could be, and is,
fixed only in Ff3, as you mention above, Boris.
I suppose most of the development the last couple of years of Cairo
and Cocoa Widgets took place on 10.4/G4s/G5s/etc. Right?
If that is the case, then that means backporting them to 10.3/G3,
which would be counterproductive.
>From The Proposal:
> http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddgz99zp_3f7p24k
"There is already a backlog of tricky Panther-only regressions, bugs,
and performance issues in areas ranging from widgets to fonts and gfx/
Cairo that I suspect will consume at least a few weeks of development
time. Over the next 6 months, especially as QA ramps up for [Ff3]
release, the number of serious Panther bugs will go up and thus
require even more time."
Given what Smokey points out also, I think the prudent thing to do is
EOL 10.3 support with Ff3, roughly in sync with Apple doing the same.
In exchange, however, it may, or may not, be worth it to enough people
to provide ongoing Ff2 maintainance support beyond the current Mozilla
policy of six months, perhaps for one whole year, following Ff3
release. That discussion would need a new thread started here, after
deciding the fate of 10.3 support.
Thank you,
Eddie
Eddie-MacG3
> In exchange, however, it may, or may not, be worth it to enough people
> to provide ongoing Ff2 maintainance support beyond the current Mozilla
> policy of six months, perhaps for one whole year, following Ff3
That is, continue to support 10.3, but do so by continuing to support
Ff2
for a longer period of time than the current Mozilla EOL policy
states,
rather than by providing 10.3 support in Ff3.
This avoids having to backport very much to 10.3,
while giving 10.3 users a longer grace period before
ditching their perfectly good legacy hardware.
Would MoFoCo be open to considering
Ff2 maintainance support for One Year
following Ff3 release, rather than only six months?
Would One Year also provide enough useful benefits to the
Linux (Debian, for example) and Windows communities?
Enterprise IT departments, for example, may prefer One Year.
Thank you,
Eddie
Axel Hecht
Looking at the technical details in the proposal, there are apparently
both engineering resource contraints, but more so, technical
constraints. It does look like a Firefox on 10.4 and .5 might be slower
due to runtime platform checks and such if we'd support 10.3. Given our
engineering resources, we still might have bugs in 10.3.
That does sounds a tad like vista support in firefox 2, if we intended
to go ahead and fix all the 10.3 bugs that slipped.
My question would be, would it be possible for 'some team' to backport
Gecko 1.9, i.e. Firefox 3 to 10.3?
Let's say we unsupport 10.3, but once Firefox 3 is done and out, offer
to open a branch off of that where 'some team' could land backporting
fixes for 10.3, with compile time switches, and create contributed
builds? Somewhat similar to what we have for Solaris?
'some team' wouldn't really be Josh per se, though such a plan wouldn't
go without moco resources, some of which would be reviews (did I just
say not-Josh? Pfff), check-in buddies, tinderbox in community network, etc.
I'd also would prefer to set a deadline by which we'd want that effort
to die or fly, so that we don't end up with a cute backport (pun!).
\bigskip
Do we have the infrastructure set up to not offer major updates from fx2
to 3 for non-supported OSes? We have at least win98 users that shouldn't
get fx3 major update offerings, IMHO.
Axel
Gervase Markham
> I believe that is when the update of any kind shipped for 10.2
Slightly philosophical, but: in absence of any clear statement, does
support end when the last patch appears, or when the subsequent patch
doesn't appear? :-)
Gerv
Gervase Markham
> Umm, so we should drop Win2k and XP SP1 as well? I heard there may no
> security updates for those any more - or did I get that incorrectly?
Win2K still has updates. Microsoft's security lifecycle pages are rather
hard to decipher. XP SP1 is supported for X months (where I think X is
12 or 24) after SP2 came out.
> And why does FF2 even support any Win9x version when security support
> has been dropped way before FF2 shipped?
Hey, I argued we should drop it, for precisely this reason :-)
Gerv
B. Polidoro
> Mike Shaver wrote:
> > On 23 May 2007 08:58:12 -0700, josh...@gmail.com <josh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> That is definitely in my original proposal. Colin's post is a response
> >> to that, please read the original.
>
> > Sorry, yeah, I missed the summarization of the set of hard cases for
> > Panther. (I almost pasted your google doc here in my reply, so that
> > it would be in the thread for quoting and direct discussion, but that
> > seemed a little passive-aggressive!)
>
> Sorry about that, that was my fault entirely for replying with the wrong
> header. Sorry if this caused any confusion! Please read Josh's original
> proposal, here's the URL again:http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddgz99zp_3f7p24k
>
> It is well written and contains a lot I didn't mention in my reply.
>
> > It sounds like the investment is pretty heavy, given our constraints
> > on the platform. I'd vote in support of dropping Panther support
> > passively for now: deblocking the Panther-only bugs, but not removing
> > existing Panther-around code, in case a motivated advocate arrives in
> > time to buy Panther one more release. (I would set "in time" as being
> > around b1, if I had to pick a time.)
>
> The investment is pretty heavy, and I would really like to point out
> that a new OS is shipping a month or so before we release. We *are*
> getting "feature complete betas," in a few weeks at WWDC, which will be
> the first time we actually know everything that's going to be in Leopard
> -- last year they told us our seeds were incomplete and there were still
> "secret features."
>
> Leopard compatibility, and devoting enough resources to it, is something
> I'm personally very worried about. We really have no idea what is in
> Leopard right now -- we'll have a better idea in a couple weeks, but
> until the OS ships (a month before we do), we will be working against a
> moving target. It is entirely possible that there will be a lot of work
> to do at the very last second to get Firefox to work properly on 10.5.
> Having to make sure we don't break 10.3 will, and has, cost us valuable
> days and weeks.
>
> If the 10.4 adoption rates are indicative, a year after the release ~50%
> of Mac OS X users will be on the new OS. It's also highly likely that
> will be quicker since there has not been an OS release in a while and
> (from what I've heard), there will be significant UI changes, which
> (assuming Apple creates something desirable) will drive sales further.
>
> > benchmark to use -- they have a vested interest in having people pay
> > for new software and hardware, and we have a vested interest in having
> > as many users as feasible upgrade to our newer software -- but it's a
> > valuable data point to be sure, especially since it limits our ability
> > to support those users well. (We won't be able to effectively protect
> > them from security problems on their platform, f.e.)
>
> Again, 10.3 users will still have Firefox 2, which we will be supporting
> for a while.
>
> This is, in part, a mention of resources. But as the platform evolves,
> there are features that we want to deliver to our users (see Josh's
> proposal for some more details) that we just cannot do on 10.3.
>
> The engineering effort for 10.3 is large enough that it is becoming a
> burden to development that affects the vast majority of our users. Josh
> has some great examples in his original proposal, please read them.
>
> -Colin
Couldn't Leopard support be achieved in a 3.0.0.x release like Vista?
I realize this question probably can't be answered for a couple of
weeks until an idea of how severe the changes required are
determined.
Brian Polidoro
Boris Zbarsky
> That is, continue to support 10.3, but do so by continuing to support
> Ff2 for a longer period of time than the current Mozilla EOL policy
> states, rather than by providing 10.3 support in Ff3.
Are you sure it's easier to backport security fixes to Gecko 1.8 than it
is to try to make Gecko 1.9 work on OS X 10.3?
1.8 is about two years old at this point. Not only does a lot of the
code work totally differently, a lot of the developers (myself included)
not longer remember the details of how it works at this point, in the
areas that changed. That means that patches take longer to write and
are more regression-prone than equivalent changes for trunk.
Of course this burden would be spread over everyone who does security
fixes rather than just the people competent to do Mac work, so it'll be
somewhat easier to actually pull off, but it'll likely be a bigger total
time sink, and a much much bigger drag on mozilla 2 (given the overlap
between the folks doing or planning to do mozilla 2 and the folks who
fix most content/layout security bugs).
It would make more sense to do a delayed Firefox 3 release for 10.3 as
Axel proposes. And it would make more sense to spend MoCo resource on
it, imo, than it would to spend the same resources on 6 more months of
maintenance for Gecko 1.8.
-Boris
B. Polidoro
> Mike Connor schrieb:
>
> > I'm going to get even more aggressive on the subject:
>
> > Do we want to support a platform that the vendor has dropped security
> > updates for? I would assert that we do not. We've historically dropped
> > platforms as they hit end of life.
> > Do we want to support platforms that are about to be dropped shortly
> > before/after targeted release dates? I would assert that we don't want
> > to do this either (Firefox 3, if released in November, will be supported
> > until May 2009, so thinking only about ship date is a little
> > short-sighted).
>
> Umm, so we should drop Win2k and XP SP1 as well? I heard there may no
> security updates for those any more - or did I get that incorrectly?
>
> has been dropped way before FF2 shipped?
>
> behind it.
>
> Robert Kaiser
I think Windows 98 might still be supported if it wasn't for Cairo.
Heck Windows 95 could still run Firefox with the right setup. So it
seems like OS security and support had taken a back seat to if it
still works then support it and to user base too. Well if it doesn't
just work on 10.3 then that's one big strike against it. The user
base could be strike 2. And 10.3 would be alot like Windows 98.
There are still people using it that will not be pleased that they
can't use the latest release.
My boss purchased a PPC G5 a while back. It had 10.3. But he
quickly upgraded to 10.4 after it came out. I wouldn't call him a
power user. Heck I still have to help him make connections to Windows
shares. I just thought I'd throw out that example.
AFAIK Windows 2000 is leaving active support and entering extended
support in a few days. At my place of employment, which is a US gov
institute, we are being forced to remove any Windows 2000 machines
from the campus network because of the end of support. At least
that's the story they're feeding us. I think there will still be
critical security updates but they won't be pushed through windows
update anymore. So Windows 2000 will be like Windows 98 for Firefox
3.
Brian Polidoro
Eddie-MacG3
> My question would be, would it be possible for
>'some team' to backport Gecko 1.9, i.e. Firefox 3 to 10.3?
> I'd also would prefer to set a deadline by which
> we'd want that effort to die or fly, so that we don't
> end up with a cute backport (pun!).
Boris Zbarsky:
> Are you sure it's easier to backport security fixes to
> Gecko 1.8 than it is to try to make Gecko 1.9 work on
> OS X 10.3?
> ...
> It would make more sense to do a delayed
> Firefox 3 release for 10.3 as Axel proposes.
I like this plan as:
- It does not delay the Ff3-OSX10.4/10.5 release.
- It does postpone the Ff3-OSX10.3 legacy support
decision to the start of the Ff2 EOL Mozilla support,
to determine then what interest and resources exist,
and allows six months to a "Ff3-Community" release.
- It could include Linux/Windows/Solaris/...
legacy support, too.
(Perhaps just extend the existing Solaris project
to include legacy Mac/Linux/Windows support?)
Thanks,
Eddie
mmag...@bnisolutions.com
could not possibly care less if the browser gets changed or updated,
ever again. FireFox 1.5 was just fine by me. Heck, I still have
some ancient Mac OS9 machines swimming along running ancient Mozilla
1.3.1. They are stable, they surf every site I need with no trouble
at all, and security problems? WHAT security problems?
This endless death spiral of ever-changing OS versions and browser
versions serves no one except the kooks at Yahoo who keep finding new
a better ways to rewrite and break all their services (like TV, maps,
Discussions) that used to be slick and fast on any browser on earth.
God, you guys. Just leave well enough alone.
And this from a software developer (me)!
Boris Zbarsky
> They are stable, they surf every site I need with no trouble
> at all, and security problems? WHAT security problems?
The sort that allow any website to run arbitrary executable code on your
computer simply upon you loading your site, for example?
We've fixed definitely dozens, and probably hundreds, of those since
Mozilla 1.3.
-Boris
Colin Barrett
> Looking at the technical details in the proposal, there are apparently
> both engineering resource contraints, but more so, technical
> constraints. It does look like a Firefox on 10.4 and .5 might be slower
> due to runtime platform checks and such if we'd support 10.3. Given our
> engineering resources, we still might have bugs in 10.3.
>
> That does sounds a tad like vista support in firefox 2, if we intended
> to go ahead and fix all the 10.3 bugs that slipped.
>
> My question would be, would it be possible for 'some team' to backport
> Gecko 1.9, i.e. Firefox 3 to 10.3?
>
> Let's say we unsupport 10.3, but once Firefox 3 is done and out, offer
> to open a branch off of that where 'some team' could land backporting
> fixes for 10.3, with compile time switches, and create contributed
> builds? Somewhat similar to what we have for Solaris?
>
> 'some team' wouldn't really be Josh per se, though such a plan wouldn't
> go without moco resources, some of which would be reviews (did I just
> say not-Josh? Pfff), check-in buddies, tinderbox in community network, etc.
>
> I'd also would prefer to set a deadline by which we'd want that effort
> to die or fly, so that we don't end up with a cute backport (pun!).
This sounds cool in theory but there is one major problem: Who are these
people? The community of people contributing to Widget:Cocoa is not
tiny, but it is not huge either. If you're willing to devote serious
engineering resources to 10.3, step forward.
10.3's marketshare is going to continually decrease. We also dropped
support for 10.2 Jaguar, where are those users? Are they also being left
out in the cold? Should we spend more engineering resources backporting
to 10.2 or 10.1 or even 10.0? I'm sure there are still users on those
OSes as well. I don't mean to conflate things here, but I hope you can
see what I'm driving at here.
Smokey Ardissone wrote:
> and scrollbars (bug 377225, but they're broken in many ways that
> aren't 10.3-specific, too, by a quick glance at the Widget:Cocoa
> buglist).
That's overstating the problem quite a bit. Scrollbars are quite horked
on 10.3, but work mostly fine except for some edge cases on 10.4. I
don't think I should mention what happens on 10.5 in an obviously public
forum (Hi slashdot!).
-Colin
Axel Hecht
Hrm. Seems like I deleted all the hints that I had in there on who "some
team" is. Like, I deleted sentences like "is there a mac community we
could reach out to" and "use the community build farm" as they sounded
to constraining. Nor did I mention "just like SeaMonkey is".
Anyway, my idea is to open up that project to anyone that wants. I added
the deadline for that effort to die or fly mainly for one reason, and
that is, to make sure we're not grinding ourselves to death for nothing.
On the other hand, it'd suck if we had a few volunteers and the project
would die due to stale review requests or the tinderbox dying without
someone setting it back up or such.
Also, those coding the cocoa widget code now should have an eye on not
breaking 10.3 just because they could, but really only where it's really
vital.
Thus, preparing for that project to open then, the mac widget team would
need to make some commitments today. None of which I can make or help
out with.
Clearer?
Axel
timeless
> The point is that it's fairly old hardware, and those users are probably
> not the types to try an alternative browser -- they'll probably just
> stick with Safari.
I'm one of them. Safari crashes if I click either of the crashme
buttons in bugzilla's edit attachment page. so, I use camino/
minefield.
i'm probably not counted in firefox numbers because I rarely use
official release builds. I use nightlies.
I don't expect to ever buy a newer version of OSX for my mac, which is
a G5 and was bought in summer '04 iirc. That makes it less than 3
years old. which for me is young. my pc is from aug '98.
If I had money (and I don't), I'd probably buy a new mac. But I think
like many apple watchers, I'm more likely to consider trying to figure
out how to buy an iPhone than I am to try to buy a new mac. And given
my current location, if I were to buy a mac (or OS X for that matter),
I'm sure I'd be ripped off by an additional 100 USD (probably more)
(this is above the MSRP or whatever that you or someone else quotes,
and is affected by things like VAT, magical pricing, and currency
exchange rates).
On May 23, 4:26 am, Robert Sayre <say...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I do agree that we shouldn't spend inordinate developer resources on
> 5-6% of 5-6% of our users.
I'll probably get in trouble for commenting on this. I'll bug you on
irc about this.
But just a short question. Do Mac OS (X) users as a whole make up even
4% of our total userbase?
> With Linux, we need to be careful because of
> the way it overlaps with our developer base (though it doesn't help to
> muddle the two).
I like to think that I'm also a developer. Although practically
speaking, at this point I'm more of a user on OS X than a developer.
Does that make me a victim here?
> It's not pleasant to drop support for users that want to use Firefox 3
> without paying Apple $100, but engineering is about all about
> trade-offs. It doesn't seem like we have the resources to do it all, on
> three versions of Mac OS X, and effectively compete with Safari, which
> doesn't support older OS X versions for major upgrades.
Indeed. I haven't been able to use safari seriously for years. Long
before Apple end of lifes OS X 10.3.
FWIW, My most recent update to OS X 10.3.9 was May 25, 2007 / Security
Update 2007-005 / 1.0. I got it when I came home this past Friday.
> - Rob, who snidely predicted this day when support for 10.2 was dropped,
I think I remember worrying when people went after 10.2 that I was
going to lose my 10.3 device. I can't exactly say that I'm shocked.
> and it was promised that 10.3 would be supported for Fx3, but now thinks
> we should drop it like a rock
<snide> I take it you've moved into (resource) management :)
WRT schools. Historically I remember them taking 6 years to get enough
computers for a school w/ 6 grades. In fact, it was more likely that
it'd take closer to 10 years because if you had 4 classes per grade,
you'd be lucky to get say 25 computers in a single year under a
program like Apples for the Students. School systems most definitely
do not buy new computers for all grades in all schools every 1-2
years.
In theory, a school system /might/ be able to get licenses for an OS
update. But from memory, The computers we had in high school in were
still running w95 when I visited in '99.
==
In all likelihood, the next time I have disposable income and an
opportunity to buy another Apple product that suits my potential
needs, I will take the opportunity. When I considered the option of
getting a new computer the last the time I did, I chose a Macintosh
because Apple makes good hardware and I expected everything would just
work, and it does and well, well, excluding Safari+Bugzilla. Oddly, I
expected that browsers of all the pieces of software on the computer
would be the least of my headaches, working on one and believing that
it's just software that could be upgraded. Especially at the time
having known that I could drop modern browsers onto much older
computers, e.g. Firefox or IE6 onto a computer from 1998 - 6 years old
at the time.
Not to get conspiracy theory, but Apple is a hardware vendor. They
make good hardware, and they make money selling hardware. It's in
their best interests for me to buy a new piece of their hardware.
Mozilla Corporation or Mozilla Foundation or whatever, to my knowledge
is not a hardware vendor and doesn't compete for hardware revenue.
Actually, I have no idea what any of the Mozilla entities competes for
or tries to achieve. I think it's market and mindshare, but perhaps
it's something else entirely.
I am willing to test fixes for OS X 10.3.x related problems since they
most certainly affect me, and to the extent that I'm actually home,
I'll gladly work w/ people on developing fixes...
Robert Sayre
> Colin Barrett wrote:
>
> But just a short question. Do Mac OS (X) users as a whole make up even
> 4% of our total userbase?
Oh, I was just working with Colin's numbers. We'll have harder decisions
to make if we find something substantially greater.
>
> Indeed. I haven't been able to use safari seriously for years. Long
> before Apple end of lifes OS X 10.3.
>
> FWIW, My most recent update to OS X 10.3.9 was May 25, 2007 / Security
> Update 2007-005 / 1.0. I got it when I came home this past Friday.
>
Interesting.
- Rob
Samuel Sidler
> we should be able to dig this data out. there are some problems
> currently with the loging and reporting system so it might be a few days.
>
> generally the places that report Mac OS version info like
> http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
> don't provide as much detail about OSX versions as they do for windows.
At his keynote today at WWDC, Steve Jobs announced that 23% of all Mac
OS X users are using 10.3.
Given that percentage (almost a quarter of all OS X users), I'm not sure
how we can justify dropping support for 10.3, even if we assume a good
portion of them upgrade.
--
Samuel Sidler
Mike Connor
OS X claims 22 million users per the same keynote, so we're talking
about approximately five million _potential_ users, and that is a
number that will only decrease before Firefox 2 reaches end of life
(especially with another OS upgrade cycle coming, and older machines
that can still run 10.3 starting to fail/be replaced in greater
numbers). Windows 98/ME had close to 70 million users last July, and
we still made the decision that we were not going to continue support
in Firefox 3. Most current estimates seem to have the number of
active computer users between 600 and 700 million users, so we're
talking less than 1% of potential users.
Ultimately, the decision must be made on resource and time
constraints. If the choice is supporting fewer OS versions at a
higher quality level or more OS versions at a lower quality level, I
believe the choice is clear. We don't have the resources at present
(nor do I think we will in the future) to support 10.3 without
compromising on quality elsewhere, and I don't think we should make
that compromise based on a small and shrinking number. We've drawn
those lines for Windows (2000 and up) and Linux (recent libraries
across the board) for Firefox 3, I think we need to make the same
tough choices about what we can and can't do on Mac.
-- Mike
Eddie-MacG3
is 0.7% of 700 million.
A year from now, will there be even 1 million?
That's 0.14% of 700 million.
Does the Ff3 Target Market include that 0.14%?
Eddie
10.3 user
SeaMonkey user, too!
Ken Herron
> 5 million (OSX 10.3 users curently)
> is 0.7% of 700 million.
>
> A year from now, will there be even 1 million?
> That's 0.14% of 700 million.
Well, Jobs also said that 2.2 million Mac users (10% of the total) were
using versions older than 10.3. So yes, a year from now there will
probably be a lot more than a million 10.3 users.
Ken
Eddie-MacG3
> Eddie-MacG3 wrote:
> > 5 million (OSX 10.3 users curently)
> > is 0.7% of 700 million.
>
> > A year from now, will there be even 1 million?
> > That's 0.14% of 700 million.
>
> using versions older than 10.3.
Ok:
23% + 10% = 33%
33% * 22M = 7.3M
7.3M / 700M * 100 = 1.0% (Mac <= OSX 10.3)
The above are current figures.
What about a year from now when:
- OSX 10.3 and Ff2 are EOLed.
I'm guessing/assuming the 33% will fall to
the 10% level again over time.
2.2M / 700M * 100 = 0.31% (Mac <= OSX 10.3)
>> Does the Ff3 Target Market include that ...
0.31% (Mac <= OSX 10.3),
or less (OSX 10.3 only)?
Thank you,
Eddie
Dan Mosedale
> At his keynote today at WWDC, Steve Jobs announced that 23% of all Mac
> OS X users are using 10.3.
>
> Given that percentage (almost a quarter of all OS X users), I'm not sure
> how we can justify dropping support for 10.3, even if we assume a good
> portion of them upgrade.
If these users don't feel it's important to upgrade their OS from 10.3,
what evidence do we have that they will find it compelling to upgrade
Firefox beyond 2.x?
Dan
Boris Zbarsky
> If these users don't feel it's important to upgrade their OS from 10.3,
> what evidence do we have that they will find it compelling to upgrade
> Firefox beyond 2.x?
I think there's a fundamental difference here: Upgrading OS X costs $129 in the
best case. Upgrading Firefox is free. I know it's easy to lose track of this
if you work in the computer industry, but $129 is _not_ a trivial amount of
money for many people. And yes, people for whom this is not a trivial amount of
money do sometimes have macs. iMacs, typically.
Plus what Robert Accettura said, of course. Upgrading the OS is just not
something most "I'm afraid of computers" users are willing to try (and if you
know my opinions on OS upgrades, you'll know that I can't blame them). Whereas
Firefox prompts you for the upgrade.
-Boris
Eddie-MacG3
> I think there's a fundamental difference here:
> Upgrading OS X costs $129 in the best case.
Meaning: if the upgrade supports your legacy Mac hardware.
A major reason 10% of Mac users still use <10.3
is their older Mac hardware still runs fine,
but is not supported by 10.3/4/5.
My Blue G3 is supported by 10.4, but not 10.5.
I still run 10.3, though. Works good enough.
Still, I think we go astray here.
The support decision for Ff3 for 10.3
should be based on whether
10.3 is EOLed yet by the time Ff2 is EOLed.
The answer is, Yes. 10.3 is expected to be EOLed
by or around the time Ff2 is EOLed.
Does the Ff3 Target Market include that 0.33% or so
of the 700M World Market that runs EOLed Mac OSes?
Remember, this is also a Mozilla platform issue,
Cairo, Gecko, XUL Runner, etc. Is it good policy to
hobble the Mozilla platform code and resources
to continue support for EOLed Mac OSes? I doubt it.
I do think continued community support of Ff2,
beyond the formal Mozilla EOL of Ff2,
would be nice. (As with MozSuite/SeaMonkey.)
Millions of users could still benefit
from Ff2 for years to come
for whom Ff3 may not be an option.
Thank you,
Eddie
RyanVM
> Whereas Firefox prompts you for the upgrade.
>
Correct me if I'm wrong, but 10.3 users wouldn't have to prompted for
a major update past 2.0, would they?
Mike Connor
I think Boris' point is that they don't get prompts to upgrade to
10.4, if you don't pay a lot of attention to the web, you'll possibly
miss the fact that 10.4 or even 10.5 is out there.
-- Mike
Benjamin Smedberg
To put a finer point on it, they may be aware that 10.4 or 10.5 is
avaialable, but have no compelling reason to upgrade. AFAICT mac software
update never tells people "you are running a version of MaOS that no longer
has security updates and you are at risk".
And if we don't support 10.3, our users will end up in that position
eventually (6 months after we release FF3). Are we going to prompt users
"you browser is insecure, but sorry there's nothing you can do about it
unless you upgrade your OS? Of course, we have this problem already with
Windows 98/ME.
--BDS
Mike Connor
On 13-Jun-07, at 9:21 AM, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> And if we don't support 10.3, our users will end up in that position
> eventually (6 months after we release FF3). Are we going to prompt
> users
> "you browser is insecure, but sorry there's nothing you can do
> about it
> unless you upgrade your OS? Of course, we have this problem already
> with
> Windows 98/ME.
We do, and that was a much larger number of users (iirc, there were
as many Win98 users as total Mac users).
Ultimately, it seems like we're talking about these five million
users as if they're all going to see the light and switch over from
IE/Mac and Safari 1.x to Firefox 3. If I thought that was a
realistic outcome, I'd be the first to throw resources at the
problem. Historically, however, the users who adopt Firefox have
been skewed running newer operating systems, so I think its quite
unlikely that there's much of a tangible return on investment here.
-- Mike
Boris Zbarsky
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but 10.3 users wouldn't have to prompted for
> a major update past 2.0, would they?
That depends on whether something past 2.0 supports 10.3, I would hope.
-Boris
Boris Zbarsky
> Still, I think we go astray here.
I was just responding to the point you brought up.
> The support decision for Ff3 for 10.3
> should be based on whether
> 10.3 is EOLed yet by the time Ff2 is EOLed.
Maybe. I'm not convinced this is the right metric.
If it is, that leaves the minor problem of not knowing whether 10.3 has been EOLed.
> The answer is, Yes. 10.3 is expected to be EOLed
> by or around the time Ff2 is EOLed.
Reference, please? I'd like to see some actual evidence for this, for once.
> Does the Ff3 Target Market include that 0.33% or so
> of the 700M World Market that runs EOLed Mac OSes?
That's an interesting question, yes. I guess it depends on how seriously we
take principles 4 and 5 in the Mozilla Manifesto and how we weigh them agains
the other principles and against available resources.
A strict reading of principles 4 and 5 would read "yes" in response to that
question, in my opinion.
> Remember, this is also a Mozilla platform issue,
> Cairo, Gecko, XUL Runner, etc. Is it good policy to
> hobble the Mozilla platform code and resources
> to continue support for EOLed Mac OSes? I doubt it.
It's a balancing act. So far, I agree that the balance seems to fall in favor
of dropping support for 10.3, but the fact that it does so is a bad thing in my
opinion, both in the short term (for users, even if they don't know it) and in
the longer term (because it creates unhappy users where if we had the resources
we could create evangelists).
Of course I'm not sure everyone agrees with me on this...
> I do think continued community support of Ff2,
> beyond the formal Mozilla EOL of Ff2,
> would be nice.
I don't think it's feasible. The key would be community fixes for security
bugs, which are hard to come by. Both because security bugs tend to be hard to
fix, and because they're hard to find by someone not in the security group.
Further, I doubt that vulnerability announcements would wait on community fixes
in Fx2, which would make the whole exercise pointless.
I'd be glad to be wrong on this, of course.
-Boris
Boris Zbarsky
> Historically, however, the users who adopt Firefox have been skewed running newer operating
> systems, so I think its quite unlikely that there's much of a tangible
> return on investment here.
As I said in the past, if we're happy staying with our current user demographic,
I agree...
I also have to admit that it's not really clear what the investment involved
would be; my one post that asked questions about the feasibility of, e.g.,
having a Fx3 release for OS X 10.3 that's delayed or otherwise not a tier1
release sort of went unanswered.
I hate to ask this, but is there a way to solve the resource problem on Mac with
judicious hiring? Or is the ramp-up just too long for it to make a difference?
-Boris
Boris Zbarsky
> It's a balancing act. So far, I agree that the balance seems to fall in
> favor of dropping support for 10.3, but the fact that it does so is a
> bad thing in my opinion
Put another way:
1) I think the current situation (having to decide whether to support 10.3 due
to resource issues) is very unfortunate. Do people agree with that?
2) If so, how do we plan to avoid or ameliorate it in the future (with 10.5,
Win2k, whatever)?
-Boris
Robert Kaiser
> And if we don't support 10.3, our users will end up in that position
> eventually (6 months after we release FF3). Are we going to prompt users
> "you browser is insecure, but sorry there's nothing you can do about it
> unless you upgrade your OS? Of course, we have this problem already with
> Windows 98/ME.
I'm starting to think that we may have good reason for supporting the
1.8 branch longer than those 6 months after a 1.9 release, just for the
reason that we still can give Win9x and Panther users a browser that is
still secure and working.
Robert Kaiser
Boris Zbarsky
> I'm starting to think that we may have good reason for supporting the
> 1.8 branch longer than those 6 months after a 1.9 release
As I already mentioned, this might be more work than just making it work well on
Panther. Fixing 1.8 security bugs is _already_ pretty hard because the code is
so different from trunk...
Of course backporting security bugs is probably easier than making 1.9 work on
Win9x, yes. ;)
-Boris
Simon Paquet
I do not consider this main reason for supporting the 1.8 branch a little
bit longer. For me a valid reason to support it longer are the different
release cycles of Firefox and Thunderbird.
Thunderbird 2 was released nearly 6 months later than Firefox 2, giving
it a much smaller support window.
Take this together with the fact, that Lightning will have to stay on the
branch as long as TB 2 is the stable release. Therefore the Calendar
developers would really appreciate it, if our 0.9 or our 1.0 release,
which will probably come out before TB 3, would not fall into a time
period, when the 1.8 branch is no longer supported with security fixes.
I don't know about the Seamonkey folks, but I would consider a 2.0
release of the suite with a mail backend, that is not yet considered
stable by the main developers, a pretty bad idea.
Simon
--
Calendar l10n coordinator
Calendar Website Maintainer: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Calendar developer blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar
maes...@netscape.net
an end. Panther is by the moment a "de-facto" standard for Mac users and
developers. Many applications are still oriented to this version, and it
has very much in common with Tiger. Even Apple considers it a question
of proud, and they keep their support still.
But you are going in circles, turning round and round the wheel,
with no clear judgement. The question is that till this moment you
really have said nothing, but in this way the question will become
solved by itself. Discussing and arguing with no reasoning will bring
the time for the system to get really obsolete, while you still keep
discussing. Stop that, please, and take a resolution for an end.
*Ralf*
Sic clueor *MaeseRalf*
Eddie-MacG3
> Eddie-MacG3 wrote:
> If it is, that leaves the minor problem of not knowing whether 10.3 has been EOLed.
>
> > The answer is, Yes. 10.3 is expected to be EOLed
> > by or around the time Ff2 is EOLed.
>
> Reference, please? I'd like to see some actual evidence for this, for once.
Half-educated utter speculation:
[msg ~#47]
On May 23, 3:54 pm, Eddie-MacG3:
> >From above discussion:
>
> 10.4 released: APR 2005
> 10.2 EOL: ~DEC 2005
> Overlap: ~8 months
>
> Extrapolating:
> 10.5 expected: ~NOV 2007 (hmm, ~Ff3 expected, too)
> 10.3 EOL: ~JUN 2008 (hmm, ~Ff2 EOL, too)
Eddie
Boris Zbarsky
> Half-educated utter speculation:
Right.
> On May 23, 3:54 pm, Eddie-MacG3:
>> >From above discussion:
>>
>> 10.4 released: APR 2005
>> 10.2 EOL: ~DEC 2005
Of course that's a guess (though I agree a good one). There's no actual
statement that it's been EOL; Apple could release a patch tomorrow.
-Boris
dda...@growthstrat.com
> Justin Dolske wrote:
> > 2 years is a long time in the software industry, but not so much for the
> > rest of the world. I would assume there is still lots of pre-2005
> > hardware and software being used in schools and homes.
>
> Amen. That's exactly what I see when I look at what non-technical
> non-early-adopter users (you recall, the folks we want to expand Firefox
> market share with) are using.
>
> > That said, if there are a lot of 10.3 users but they're not showing up
> > in our FF1/FF2 usage stats, then they're probably not relevant for FF3.
>
> If you assume that we're not trying to expand our market share in this
> segment, then yes. Are we making that assumption?
>
> (I'm not saying it's a bad assumption; I just want us to be conscious
> that we're making it.)
>
> > I can see dropping 10.3 being a win for getting us there faster and
> > reducing testing requirements, though.
>
> That's really what the whole thing is about -- lack of resources. I'm
> really pretty unhappy with us dropping OS X 10.3 (because a number of
> people I've only recently converted to Firefox are using it), but I can
> see why we might have to do it given the date constraints on our Gecko
> 1.9 release. :(
>
> -Boris
You software developers seem to be caught up in your own world rather
than the world of the consumer. We don't have the options nor the
money to keep changing...being forced to change, really...to the
newest stuff. My wife is still using one of the original of Blueberry
iMac's with OS 9.1. She's having a heck of a time with her computer
now for most everything.
But we can't afford another computer. Here I am a 10.3.9 -OS X user
on a PowerBook G4 who just recently discovered Firefox. But you're
going to force me, inevitably, to leave it. I'm 66. Semi-retired,
but need my computer for more than pleasure. I still need to earn a
living off it, but you're willing to take me out of the loop of
advancement so you can speed on a warp speed to make changes.
It was clear to me that the Microsofts and even the Apple's of this
world were caught up in this change for change sake world, but I
didn't think developers of an open system like Linux and a browser
like Firefox would also be cauught up in that world, too.