Intent to deprecate: MacOS 10.6-10.8 support

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is notice of an intent to deprecate support within Firefox for the following old versions of MacOS: 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8

The motivation for this change is that we have continued failures that are specific to these old operating systems and don't have the resources on engineering teams to prioritize these bugs. Especially with the deployment of e10s we're seeing intermittent and permanently failures on MacOS 10.6 that we are not seeing elsewhere. We get very little testing of old MacOS versions from our prerelease testers and cannot dedicate much paid staff testing support to these platforms. We also have an increasingly fragile set of old hardware that supports automated tests on 10.6 and do not intend to replace this.

This will affect approximately 1.2% of our current release population. Here are the specific breakdowns by OS version:

10.6	0.66%
10.7	0.38%
10.8	0.18%

The final timeframe for this deprecation has not been finalized, but the current proposal is to remove support in Firefox 46. We will try and update existing users on old MacOS versions to the Firefox 45 ESR release stream, so that they stay with security update support through the end of 2016.

Because of the ESR update window, I would like to finalize this decision by Monday. If you have questions or concerns about this plan, please reply to the firefox-dev mailing list immediately. Jeff Griffiths will be working with our communications team to coordinate more public communications such as post to the Future of Firefox blog.

--BDS

[Chris Peterson]

btw, Chrome plans to drop support for Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 (and Windows XP and Vista) in April. When that happens, perhaps we can advertise Firefox to Chrome users on those operating systems looking for a browser that will still receive security updates. :-)

This will be Google's third attempt to drop XP, so I would not be surprised if it got a another reprieve.

https://chrome.googleblog.com/2015/11/updates-to-chrome-platform-support.html

_______________________________________________
firefox-dev mailing list
firef...@mozilla.org
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev

[Mike Hommey]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 01:03:43PM -0500, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> This is notice of an intent to deprecate support within Firefox for the
> following old versions of MacOS: 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8
>
> The motivation for this change is that we have continued failures that are
> specific to these old operating systems and don't have the resources on
> engineering teams to prioritize these bugs. Especially with the deployment
> of e10s we're seeing intermittent and permanently failures on MacOS 10.6
> that we are not seeing elsewhere. We get very little testing of old MacOS
> versions from our prerelease testers and cannot dedicate much paid staff
> testing support to these platforms. We also have an increasingly fragile set
> of old hardware that supports automated tests on 10.6 and do not intend to
> replace this.
>
> This will affect approximately 1.2% of our current release population. Here
> are the specific breakdowns by OS version:
>
> 10.6
> 0.66%
> 10.7
> 0.38%
> 10.8
> 0.18%

It's unfair to mention those populations by percentage of the global
Firefox population. What are those percentages relative to the number of
OSX users? ISTR 10.6 represented something like 25% of the OSX users,
which is a totally different story (but maybe I'm mixing things with
Windows XP).

Mike

[Nathan Froyd]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 5:25 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 01:03:43PM -0500, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> This will affect approximately 1.2% of our current release population. Here
> are the specific breakdowns by OS version:
>
> 10.6
>       0.66%
> 10.7
>       0.38%
> 10.8
>       0.18%

It's unfair to mention those populations by percentage of the global
Firefox population. What are those percentages relative to the number of
OSX users? ISTR 10.6 represented something like 25% of the OSX users,
which is a totally different story (but maybe I'm mixing things with
Windows XP).

I heard much the same thing from the media team when I suggested getting rid of 10.6 support to make our C++ standard library situation easier.  CC'ing Anthony.

-Nathan

[Ryan VanderMeulen]

25% is pretty close for 10.6-10.8 combined. However, the current proposal includes security patches for nearly a year still (putting them on the ESR45 train), so construing this as abandoning those users seems like it's going a bit far.

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 5:25 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:

[Tyler Downer]

The other thing to note is many of those users can still update to 10.11, and I imagine that over the next year that number will continue to go down. This also provides a decent workaround that our support community can recommend in documentation and the forums.

--

Tyler Downer

Project Manager, User Advocacy

[Tyler Downer]

That brings up a point, if a user is on 10.8, gets moved to ESR 45, and later moves to 10.11, will they be stuck on ESR still?

[Adam Roach]

On 3/10/16 4:50 PM, Ryan VanderMeulen wrote:

25% is pretty close for 10.6-10.8 combined. However, the current proposal includes security patches for nearly a year still (putting them on the ESR45 train), so construing this as abandoning those users seems like it's going a bit far.

I'm not sure the difference between "abandoning" and "irreversibly locking into being abandoned in ~1 year" is all that great. After initial drop-off, these versions have a pretty stable tail on them.

http://lowendmac.com/2015/the-rise-and-fall-of-mac-os-x-versions-2009-to-2015/

OS X 10.7, in particular, was the first release to leave behind the Core Duo and Core Solo Intel hardware, which is still pretty capable and (apparently) still used by some sizable portion of the Mac community [1]. You'll notice, for example, that 10.6 has many more users than 10.7 or 10.8 does; and, in fact, appears to still account for 1 out of every 10 Mac users.

To be clear: these users cannot upgrade to 10.9 or later. It simply won't install.

To put this in perspective: we continue to support XP, some 9 years after after the January 2007 release date of its successor. OS X 10.9 didn't come out until October of 2013, which is only two and a half years ago.

____
[1] Full disclosure: I have and continue to use such hardware personally.

--

Adam Roach
Principal Platform Engineer
a...@mozilla.com
+1 650 903 0800 x863

[Anthony Jones]

My understanding is that the reason people stick to 10.6 is because of Rosetta[1] which offers PowerPC compatibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

Chrome is dropping support for these platforms so it seems like an opportunity to pick up some of their discarded users. I'd rather have a 1% gain in market share than a 1% loss. The question is whether supporting 10.6 costs us more than 1% of our resources.

Some people may upgrade from 10.7 or 10.8 but last time I looked at the graph I saw 10.6 was on very slow decay path probably inline with hardware replacement.

10.6 has been more effort to support in the past (i.e. getting decoders working) but I don't think it costs us more to maintain.

Anthony

[Trevor Saunders]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 04:01:15PM -0700, Tyler Downer wrote:
> The other thing to note is many of those users can still update to 10.11,
> and I imagine that over the next year that number will continue to go down.

given they haven't upgraded from 10.6 - 10.8 why do you believe they are
likely to in the future?

Trev

> _______________________________________________
> dev-platform mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform

[Adam Roach]

On 3/10/16 5:17 PM, Trevor Saunders wrote:

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 04:01:15PM -0700, Tyler Downer wrote:

The other thing to note is many of those users can still update to 10.11,
and I imagine that over the next year that number will continue to go down.

given they haven't upgraded from 10.6 - 10.8 why do you believe they are
likely to in the future?

Or even can? As I point out in my other message, a lot of the Intel Mac hardware cannot go past 10.6.

[Mike Hommey]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 05:20:41PM -0600, Syd Polk wrote:
> I do, however, think that supporting 10.6 is a heavy, heavy burden, as its C++ compiler is truly ancient.

We build Firefox targetting 10.6 with a development version of clang 3.8
(that is, a clang build from a svn revision during the 3.8 development
cycle). What *is* ancient is its libstdc++.

[Kyle Huey]

Why can't we just not ship e10s to these users?  We have a number of other populations we're not shipping to, at least for now.

- Kyle

[Justin Dolske]

I don't think it's entirely unfair -- both sets of numbers have their place. OS X is an important platform, but it's also true that these older OS X releases represent a tiny portion of our overall userbase.

For a few more data points...

Back in Firefox 16 when we dropped 10.5 -- another long-lived and popular release -- those users represented 17% of our OS X users (or 0.78% of overall userbase). Dropping 10.6 - 10.8 is about 1.5x the impact (percentage wise), and so we should think carefully about that, but it's not significantly out of character for what we've done before.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/aT7hy7YDdqA/j2O0bUnuYMEJ

When we dropped 10.4 (early in the Firefox 4.0 cycle, about a year before release), it represented 25% of 3.5 users and 17% of 3.6 users. (I don't see a overall userbase number in the thread.)
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.planning/fTpkdYa6uZM/9aPn58hvVa8J

And waaaay back when we dropped 10.3 (for FF3.0), it represented 16.5% of OS X users, 0.69% of total user base.

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/msg/c19ecb46e27dbf91
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/msg/4bd908b72a5e0759

One thing all of these threads show is that there's a lot of noise and handwringing and doomsayers when we broach the topic of dropping support for an OS X release. :)

Justin

[Mike Hommey]

This is actually a sensible option.
A not-quite top-notch but up-to-date Firefox is still better than old
versions of Firefox or other browsers.

[Tyler Downer]

I'm not making any claims other than pointing out that the upgrade is
possible for some users, and its a workaround we can give in SUMO. I
have no other irons in this fire, just making sure we know the
workarounds (and how accessible they are) is an important piece of
this decision.

As has been stated in this thread already, not all these users can
update, not all will, but they likely are some that just haven't
gotten around to it where upgrading is a good workaround.

[Syd Polk]

10.6 is the last version with Rosetta. Given how old the machines are that can run 10.6, and given how old 10.6 itself is, it is highly likely that 10.6 customers still have PowerPC apps that they run and they cannot/will not upgrade.

Also, the perception of the Mac community in general is that 10.6 is the most stable release of OS X.

If you have old hardware (esp. if you have Power PC apps), there is very little reason to upgrade off of 10.6 until your hardware dies.

In the past, when these numbers were run, 10.6 was right on up there with the latest one or two OS X releases in Firefox usage, but 10.7 and 10.8 were almost gone.

I do, however, think that supporting 10.6 is a heavy, heavy burden, as its C++ compiler is truly ancient.

Just opinion, no recommendations here.

Syd Polk
sp...@mozilla.com
+1-512-905-9904
irc: sydpolk

[Nils Ohlmeier]

> On Mar 10, 2016, at 10:03, Benjamin Smedberg <benj...@smedbergs.us> wrote:
>
> This is notice of an intent to deprecate support within Firefox for the following old versions of MacOS: 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8

Excuse my ignorance, but what means “deprecate support” exactly?

I’m only asking because of the opposing reply’s so far. I’m assuming it means we stop testing and building/releasing for these. Would it be a possible alternative to turn of the tests, but continue to build and release unsupported builds?
I know that this only prolongs it and doesn’t help with regards to the C++ problems, but would be interested in the counter arguments for such a “middle ground solution”.

Best regards
Nils Ohlmeier

[Dao Gottwald]

Mike Hommey wrote on 11.03.2016 01:52:

>> Why can't we just not ship e10s to these users? We have a number of other
>> populations we're not shipping to, at least for now.
>
> This is actually a sensible option.
> A not-quite top-notch but up-to-date Firefox is still better than old
> versions of Firefox or other browsers.

Is it? Are you confident that quality and stability of an up-to-date Firefox won't go downwards over time on those old platforms? It's not quite clear to me that it will perform better than ESR half a year or a year from now.

dao

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 3/10/2016 5:25 PM, Mike Hommey wrote:
>
> It's unfair to mention those populations by percentage of the global
> Firefox population.

Why do you think this is unfair? This is about making the best use of
our limited engineering/testing/QA resources, and so what really matters
is the total impact, not just the impact relative to the mac population.

Dolske answered with more details about the numbers.

On 3/10/2016 6:38 PM, Nils Ohlmeier wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance, but what means “deprecate support” exactly?
>
> I’m only asking because of the opposing reply’s so far. I’m assuming it means we stop testing and building/releasing for these. Would it be a possible alternative to turn of the tests, but continue to build and release unsupported builds?

We intend to do the following things:

* add version checking to the builds so that they refuse to run on these
versions of MacOS
* stop doing any software testing on these versions of MacOS
* stop automated testing on Mac 10.6

As soon as we stop testing, we are going to break things. We shouldn't
be willing to call things "Firefox" that we aren't proud of, which
includes real testing.

On 3/10/2016 6:49 PM, Kyle Huey wrote:
>
> Why can't we just not ship e10s to these users? We have a number of other
> populations we're not shipping to, at least for now.

We did explicitly consider this option and ultimately rejected it. It
would potentially buy us at least one more ESR cycle until next January.
After that point we want e10s to be the only configuration. It comes at
the cost of ignoring known issues already as well as a nontrivial amount
of testing. Ultimately we don't believe this is the right tradeoff. It
also prevents us making progress on other areas such non-universal builds.

--BDS

[Chris Hofmann]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 9:20 AM, Benjamin Smedberg <benj...@smedbergs.us> wrote:

On 3/10/2016 5:25 PM, Mike Hommey wrote:

It's unfair to mention those populations by percentage of the global
Firefox population.

Why do you think this is unfair? This is about making the best use of our limited engineering/testing/QA resources, and so what really matters is the total impact, not just the impact relative to the mac population.

The reason for considering benefits of populations relative to their own OS are because there are two kinds of things we get out of platform support.

One is greater impact resulting from a higher overall number of users.

The other is other strategic benefits we get out of platform support like on Linux where user numbers are low, but gecko and firefox tootling and testing developer contributions are relatively high.

For Mac there is a possible web dev connection that's of possible strategic value with higher concentration of web devs on that platfor that help keep sites working well for large numbers of others.

 

Dolske answered with more details about the numbers.

 

Dolske showed some numbers that reflects where in the decline in previous Mac cycles that we removed support, but that could or could not be related to our current problem of trying to find ways to stablize and stop the decline of users.

Keeping these releases supported around just a bit longer than google gives people incentive to come back and try firefox.  Just the thing we want to happen.

If I look a a view of the numbers relative to all current Mac users it looks like 10.8 has the highest value (15% of all current Mac Users) for keeping around just a bit longer if their is any possible way to do that.  The others are in the noise.

Some one should check these numbers and see if they look right.

Version      % of all current Mac users as of back in Nov. which is the latest data I can easily get my hands on to play with.

Mac10.8.0    0.1500   

 Mac10.7.0    0.0004   
 Mac10.7.4    0.0001  
 Mac10.7.1    0.0001   
 Mac10.7.3    0.0001   

 Mac10.6.0    0.0003  

[Mike Hommey]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 12:20:30PM -0500, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> We intend to do the following things:
>
> * add version checking to the builds so that they refuse to run on these
> versions of MacOS

If we change the macos target version, that's not possible. The
resulting binaries can't even be loaded by the dynamic linker on 10.6.

Mike

[Terrence Cole]

We've had this conversation several times in the last few years and I think I've finally figured out why it has always felt subtly wrong.

Our share of users on older platforms is disproportionally high compared to the market in general because of our decline in market share. People who don't want to upgrade their OS generally don't want to "upgrade" their browser to the shiny new "chrome" thing the kids are talking about either. It is a symptom of a larger problem and it seems like we are continually hiding from that problem instead of tackling it head-on.

We should be aggressively cutting support for niche markets and spending that effort to increase our market share where it counts: where it's growing rather than rapidly shrinking. Telling 1.2% of our (admittedly small) market share to, effectively, GTFO, is pretty scary; however, I think the alternative is to simply fail as a project as we chase our users-by-default into more and more niche markets. If we can't use our resources to re-capture 1.2% of the market among people who have modern computers and no obligation to love us, then maybe we've already failed.

We need to drop support for OSX 10.8 and Windows Vista yesterday, not next year. We need to cut our losses and ship E10S while we're still relevant. We need to be the browser that works best on Android and Windows 10, not the browser that happens to already be installed.

My 2 cents,

:terrence

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 9:20 AM, Benjamin Smedberg <benj...@smedbergs.us> wrote:

_______________________________________________

[Jonas Sicking]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 9:20 AM, Benjamin Smedberg
<benj...@smedbergs.us> wrote:

> On 3/10/2016 5:25 PM, Mike Hommey wrote:
>> It's unfair to mention those populations by percentage of the global
>> Firefox population.
>
> Why do you think this is unfair? This is about making the best use of our
> limited engineering/testing/QA resources, and so what really matters is the
> total impact, not just the impact relative to the mac population.

I agree that looking at the total number of users is the correct way
to think about this.

There is some risk from a PR perspective though. I.e. headlines that
say "Firefox drops 25% of Mac users" would be unfortunate.

> On 3/10/2016 6:49 PM, Kyle Huey wrote:
>> Why can't we just not ship e10s to these users? We have a number of other
>> populations we're not shipping to, at least for now.
>
> We did explicitly consider this option and ultimately rejected it. It would
> potentially buy us at least one more ESR cycle until next January. After
> that point we want e10s to be the only configuration. It comes at the cost
> of ignoring known issues already as well as a nontrivial amount of testing.
> Ultimately we don't believe this is the right tradeoff. It also prevents us
> making progress on other areas such non-universal builds.

My impression is that non-e10s is certainly something that we'll want
to get rid of, but that we are not certain on what timeline it'll be
possible. Experience shows that big undertakings like that more often
take longer than expected, than go quicker than expected.

If we can support these users for another year, then that's certainly
a non-trivial benefit in and of itself. And it might also give users
time to migrate to more modern hardware.

Obviously, if don't think that we can support these users anyway, due
to already existing issues, then it could still be worth dropping
them. However "we're going to drop non e10s support in a year anyway"
doesn't seem like a reason to drop these users now.

/ Jonas

[Bobby Holley]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 4:28 PM, Terrence Cole <tc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

We've had this conversation several times in the last few years and I think
I've finally figured out why it has always felt subtly wrong.

Our share of users on older platforms is disproportionally high compared to
the market in general because of our decline in market share. People who
don't want to upgrade their OS generally don't want to "upgrade" their
browser to the shiny new "chrome" thing the kids are talking about either.
It is a symptom of a larger problem and it seems like we are continually
hiding from that problem instead of tackling it head-on.

We should be aggressively cutting support for niche markets and spending
that effort to increase our market share where it counts: where it's
growing rather than rapidly shrinking. Telling 1.2% of our (admittedly
small) market share to, effectively, GTFO, is pretty scary; however, I
think the alternative is to simply fail as a project as we chase our
users-by-default into more and more niche markets. If we can't use our
resources to re-capture 1.2% of the market among people who have modern
computers and no obligation to love us, then maybe we've already failed.

I don't think it's quite that simple.

I agree that it's important to recognize that users on older OSes have lower long-term value to us, because we'll _eventually_ need to stop supporting them, and there's no guarantee they'll reinstall Firefox if they move to a new machine.

However, they _do_ have short-term value, in that their continued use of Firefox makes the Web better for every other Firefox user. The number of f***s web developers give about the experience of Firefox users is directly proportional to the number of Firefox users visiting their sites. The lower that number goes, the bigger our disadvantage, and the more engineering heroics we'll need to do to compensate. By the time Opera/Presto went under, rumor has it that almost all of their resources were going to web-compat.

Its a regressive game that favors monopolists, but there you go. Ditching 1.2% of our users makes it materially more difficult to attract new ones. So we should only do it if the benefits really outweigh the costs.

I'm happy to be more aggressive about ignoring 10.6-only regressions, reducing testing, etc. If it keeps the costs manageable, I think it's preferable to ship a possibly-sub-par experience to 10.6 users than to jettison them entirely.

bholley

[Bobby Holley]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 5:13 PM, Bobby Holley <bobby...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 4:28 PM, Terrence Cole <tc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

We've had this conversation several times in the last few years and I think
I've finally figured out why it has always felt subtly wrong.

Our share of users on older platforms is disproportionally high compared to
the market in general because of our decline in market share. People who
don't want to upgrade their OS generally don't want to "upgrade" their
browser to the shiny new "chrome" thing the kids are talking about either.
It is a symptom of a larger problem and it seems like we are continually
hiding from that problem instead of tackling it head-on.

We should be aggressively cutting support for niche markets and spending
that effort to increase our market share where it counts: where it's
growing rather than rapidly shrinking. Telling 1.2% of our (admittedly
small) market share to, effectively, GTFO, is pretty scary; however, I
think the alternative is to simply fail as a project as we chase our
users-by-default into more and more niche markets. If we can't use our
resources to re-capture 1.2% of the market among people who have modern
computers and no obligation to love us, then maybe we've already failed.

I don't think it's quite that simple.

I agree that it's important to recognize that users on older OSes have lower long-term value to us, because we'll _eventually_ need to stop supporting them, and there's no guarantee they'll reinstall Firefox if they move to a new machine.

However, they _do_ have short-term value, in that their continued use of Firefox makes the Web better for every other Firefox user. The number of f***s web developers give about the experience of Firefox users is directly proportional to the number of Firefox users visiting their sites.

Though actually, I think the reality is worse than that, because the curve is probably non-linear. There's probably some relatively-discrete point (which we can't easily predict) at which declaring Firefox an "unsupported browser" becomes a sensible business decision for large, enterprise-y sites that operate that way.

We should try very hard to stay above that threshold. I don't know how much closer to it this proposal will bring us, but it's definitely more than 1.2%.
 

[Bobby Holley]

This does not jive with the data bsmedberg provided in the OP, which shows the 10.6 userbase being equal to that of 10.7 and 10.8 combined.

It's also worth considering what value we could unlock by dropping 10.6 and keeping 10.7 and above. IIUC most of the pain on the engineering side (c++ standard library, TLS for rust, etc) is related to 10.6 specifically. Things might be different in the releng world though.

 

[Kyle Huey]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 4:28 PM, Terrence Cole <tc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

We need to drop support for OSX 10.8 and Windows Vista yesterday, not next
year. We need to cut our losses and ship E10S while we're still relevant.
We need to be the browser that works best on Android and Windows 10, not
the browser that happens to already be installed.

You do realize that you're talking about throwing away nearly 20% of our user base, right?

- Kyle

[Gabor Krizsanits]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 7:03 PM, Benjamin Smedberg <benj...@smedbergs.us> wrote:

This will affect approximately 1.2% of our current release population. Here are the specific breakdowns by OS version:

Seems like a tough decision for such a short time...  There were some great points on both sides so far, but I'm missing the math. To evaluate the cost/benefit for a decision like this we should be able to estimate how much engineering time does it take for us to gain 1.2% new users and how much does it cost to keep the support. My personal estimation for the first is pretty high :(

We also might miss the opportunity to gain new users on these systems, and we risk a bad press as well, but I'm a little less concerned about these. I just feel like there should be some other way to save engineering time that costs less users but without the metrics I can only guess.

- Gabor

[Brendan Barnwell]

On 2016-03-11 16:28, Terrence Cole wrote:
>
> Our share of users on older platforms is disproportionally high compared
> to the market in general because of our decline in market share. People
> who don't want to upgrade their OS generally don't want to "upgrade"
> their browser to the shiny new "chrome" thing the kids are talking about
> either. It is a symptom of a larger problem and it seems like we are
> continually hiding from that problem instead of tackling it head-on.
>
> We should be aggressively cutting support for niche markets and spending
> that effort to increase our market share where it counts: where it's
> growing rather than rapidly shrinking. Telling 1.2% of our (admittedly
> small) market share to, effectively, GTFO, is pretty scary; however, I
> think the alternative is to simply fail as a project as we chase our
> users-by-default into more and more niche markets. If we can't use our
> resources to re-capture 1.2% of the market among people who have modern
> computers and no obligation to love us, then maybe we've already failed.
>
> We need to drop support for OSX 10.8 and Windows Vista yesterday, not
> next year. We need to cut our losses and ship E10S while we're still
> relevant. We need to be the browser that works best on Android and
> Windows 10, not the browser that happens to already be installed.

I certainly hope Firefox doesn't pursue this strategy. From my
perspective, chasing "market share" with things like pointless
"upgrades" to the UI has already thrown Firefox onto a disturbing path.
Some people don't want to upgrade their browser to the latest "chrome"
thing because the latest "chrome" thing provides little in the way of
actual improvements to user experience and actually breaks
previously-working extensions and workflows. The fact that other
browsers are pursuing this path doesn't mean Firefox should do so as
well; in fact, quite the opposite.

Firefox is about the only browser left that I can finagle into doing
something like what I want, and it seems to be fast losing that ability.
My own two cents is that the focus should be on providing a good
browser that enables users to do what they want, and then continue to
support it so users can continue to do that without disruption for as
long as possible. The only reason to drop support for an old platform
is because a new feature that is actually needed requires something not
available on the old platform. I would even be so radical as to say
that if there is not enough time to handle bugs on old platforms,
development of new features should be slowed down in order to allocate
more resources to making things work better on all platforms. Releasing
new features is not as important as making the browser (with all its
features, new and old) reliable.

--
Brendan Barnwell
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no
path, and leave a trail."
--author unknown

[Ryan VanderMeulen]

FWIW, the current plan of putting users onto the ESR45 branch is already going above and beyond what any other vendors have offered to do when dropping support. Which is saying something when you consider that Mozilla is by far the smallest (staffwise) of the major vendors.

[Lawrence Mandel]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 7:44 PM, Brendan Barnwell <bren...@brenbarn.net> wrote:

A big challenge with supporting older platforms is maintaining infrastructure to support them. In the case of OSX 10.6, we have a finite pool of hardware that we can no longer easily replace while continuing to test on this OS version. These machines do die and the pool continues to get smaller. Upgrades to automation are also held back as the latest version of select software is not able to run on older OSes as well. This requires living with out of date software or backporting newer versions, both of which have issues.

Lawrence

[Lawrence Mandel]

If the concern for user base is marketshare (as I've read and heard some people claim, although maybe not Kyle), I'm not sure this argument holds water for two reasons:

1. If we stop supporting an OS version today, all of the users on that version will not immediately switch to an alternative.

2. In the case of older OSes, if there are no other browsers shipping updates, there is really no alternative that is more attractive than the browser that you've already picked.

Lawrence

[Richard Z]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 04:28:50PM -0800, Terrence Cole wrote:
> We've had this conversation several times in the last few years and I think
> I've finally figured out why it has always felt subtly wrong.
>
> Our share of users on older platforms is disproportionally high compared to
> the market in general because of our decline in market share. People who
> don't want to upgrade their OS generally don't want to "upgrade" their
> browser to the shiny new "chrome" thing the kids are talking about either.

here is the problem. Firefox has a different userbase than chrome.
In my perceprion it is people who are cautious, prefer stable interfaces,
not attracted to blingbling and more focused on stability, privacy and
security.

Much of the blingbling features which some developers die for are
a plain nuisance for a significant share of users.
It took 4 years to fix the autoplay bug at least partially?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659285

This is what is driving away users.

Firefox won't win the blingbling race with Google and Co, maybe if it
focuses on its traditional userbase and their demands it would do
better.


Richard

--
Name and OpenPGP keys available from pgp key servers

[Kartikaya Gupta]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 5:45 PM, Anthony Jones <ajo...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> My understanding is that the reason people stick to 10.6 is because of
> Rosetta[1] which offers PowerPC compatibility.

I have a laptop on 10.6. The hardware can theoretically support newer
OS X versions, and I've upgraded it, but newer OS X versions are
severely unstable on it, causing hangs and spontaneous OS reboots. So
I downgraded back to 10.6. I don't know if this is a common scenario
but given Apple's hardware uniformity I'm probably not the only one
who has experienced this. Just saying Rosetta isn't the only reason
people stay on 10.6 :)

kats

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 3/11/2016 1:51 PM, Chris Hofmann wrote:
>
>
>
> For Mac there is a possible web dev connection that's of possible
> strategic value with higher concentration of web devs on that platfor
> that help keep sites working well for large numbers of others.

Are you arguing we should consider this influence for MacOS 10.6-10.8?

We've confidently decided that our strategic influence with web
developers is not going to be materially affected by this change.

>
>
>
>
> If I look a a view of the numbers relative to all current Mac users it
> looks like 10.8 has the highest value (15% of all current Mac Users)
> for keeping around just a bit longer if their is any possible way to
> do that. The others are in the noise.

Your numbers are incorrect. MacOS 10.6 has the highest relative share,
with 10.7 less and 10.8 much smaller. Anyone who is running 10.8 can
upgrade to modern and free MacOS versions. Be careful because Darwin
versions don't correspond to MacOS version: you have to use the table at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#Release_history
to map them.

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 3/12/2016 7:19 PM, Gabor Krizsanits wrote:
>
> Seems like a tough decision for such a short time... There were some great
> points on both sides so far, but I'm missing the math. To evaluate the
> cost/benefit for a decision like this we should be able to estimate how
> much engineering time does it take for us to gain 1.2% new users and how
> much does it cost to keep the support. My personal estimation for the first
> is pretty high :(

The math is pretty striking: the problem is not so much about user
acquisition but about retention and user engagement. We have no problem
getting new Firefox users: we still have amazingly high brand
recognition and get many downloads. In terms of retention, what kind of
engineering effort do we need to do to keep users one, two, four, eight
weeks after they've tried Firefox? In terms of ongoing engagement, the
Firefox product strategy has us measuring and optimizing how many days
(per week) Firefox users use Firefox.

Our basic product strategy is that by focusing our engineering efforts
on engagement/retention of new users, we'll end up in a much better
spot, both in terms of overall product quality and our position in the
market, than if we focus on keeping small cohorts of existing users.
That tradeoff of existing users for new-user engagement is driving our
strategy with e10s, extensions, and other engineering priorities, and is
the basis for this decision.

[Gabor Krizsanits]

Thanks for the explanation that makes perfect sense to me. By the way since the questions is never if we drop support for a system but when do we do it, would it make sense to track / measure of how much work went into maintaining a particular system in the last x month (or will be in the next month like in the e10s case)? I guess that data would help to make this decision easier and with less debates (although there are ofc always exceptional cases for fundamental releases like e10s).

- Gabor