Mozilla double standard?

[EE]

The message thread here makes me think that Mozilla has a double
standard for support of operating system versions.
http://sillydog.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17666

If Windows 2000 and Windows XP are still going to be supported, but Mac
OS Tiger (which was released AFTER both Windows versions) has had its
support dropped and Leopard support is about to be dropped, that seems
to me to be grossly unfair. What has Windows got that Mac OS has not?

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 12/21/11 1:34 PM, EE wrote:
> If Windows 2000 and Windows XP are still going to be supported

Which is not a given. Note also that Windows XP with the relevant
service packs is still supported by Microsoft; the only issue are
Windows XP versions before SP2.

> but Mac OS Tiger (which was released AFTER both Windows versions) has had its
> support dropped and Leopard support is about to be dropped, that seems
> to me to be grossly unfair. What has Windows got that Mac OS has not?

From my point of view, two things:

1) Users. Dropping support for Win2k involves dropping support for a
lot more users than dropping support for Leopard, if I recall the
numbers correctly.

2) Difficulty of making code work on both the old and new OS versions.
This is a lot easier on Windows because Microsoft tries hard to keep
backwards compatibility as it adds new features, whereas Apple typically
aggressively deprecates a feature 1 release after what they consider its
replacement is available.

The combination of those two items is what determines the "how much
effort do we need to put into this, and how many users will it help?"
thing that really matters for purposes of this discussion.

-Boris

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 12/21/2011 1:34 PM, EE wrote:
>
> If Windows 2000 and Windows XP are still going to be supported, but
> Mac OS Tiger (which was released AFTER both Windows versions) has had
> its support dropped and Leopard support is about to be dropped, that
> seems to me to be grossly unfair. What has Windows got that Mac OS
> has not?

Users. As noted in both of these threads (both the Mac and the WinXP
threads), this is about engineering tradeoffs of the development or
performance cost of supporting older operating systems versus the users
that we might lose by doing that.

--BDS

[Dave Warren]

In message <8t-dnbDw0N8vu2_T...@mozilla.org> someone
claiming to be EE <nu...@bees.wax> typed:

Life isn't always fair.

>What has Windows got that Mac OS has not?

95% market share.

[Greywolf]

On 21/12/2011 1:34 PM, EE wrote:

Backward compatibility, mostly.

Wolf K.

[Keith Nuttle]

On 12/21/2011 1:34 PM, EE wrote:

About 10 times more user!

[Ron Hunter]

Oh, how about 90%+ of the OS market... I rather suspect there are more
people still running Win2k than there are Mac OS users, combined.

[Asa Dotzler]

On 12/21/2011 10:34 AM, EE wrote:
> The message thread here makes me think that Mozilla has a double
> standard for support of operating system versions.
> http://sillydog.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17666
>
> If Windows 2000 and Windows XP are still going to be supported

Windows 2000 and XP RTM and SP1 may be unsupported soon because the
engineering cost associated with maintaining them is increasing and
their user base is shrinking. That user base is still larger than Tiger
and Leopard combined so it's a somewhat more difficult decision.

- A

[Robert Kaiser]

EE schrieb:

There's no double standard. It's all about when the cost to maintain
support outweighs the win of the amount of users we can maintain by it.

Robert kaiser


--
Note that any statements of mine - no matter how passionate - are never
meant to be offensive but very often as food for thought or possible
arguments that we as a community should think about. And most of the
time, I even appreciate irony and fun! :)

[PhillipJones]

Robert Kaiser wrote:
> EE schrieb:
>> The message thread here makes me think that Mozilla has a double
>> standard for support of operating system versions.
>> http://sillydog.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17666
>>
>> If Windows 2000 and Windows XP are still going to be supported, but Mac
>> OS Tiger (which was released AFTER both Windows versions) has had its
>> support dropped and Leopard support is about to be dropped, that seems
>> to me to be grossly unfair. What has Windows got that Mac OS has not?
>
> There's no double standard. It's all about when the cost to maintain
> support outweighs the win of the amount of users we can maintain by it.
>
> Robert kaiser
>
>

It actually is a Double Standard but no one is going to admit it.

There are a lot more people using Tiger, or Leopard, a Snow Leopard out
there Mozilla wants to admit.

One thing that makes it easy for Mozilla to support Windows so easy, is
basically every version of windows is still based on heart of hearts
with DOS. it well hidden. So they really don't have to adjust the code
all that much. On the other hand, Mac is based on Unix, and UNIX is
constantly being updated. At one time OSX was based on BSD UNIX. Then
Apple switched to FreeBSD. Mac OSX is just more complex to write for.
Mozilla don't want to be bothered with keeping up all the different
variations.

--
Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T. "If it's Fixed, Don't Break it"
http://www.phillipmjones.net mailto:pjo...@kimbanet.com

[Axel Grude]

Support for many more hardware platforms :-)

[EE]

I did not think that Snow Leopard was all that different from Leopard.
A lot of Mac software that was made for Leopard works fine on Snow Leopard.

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 12/22/11 2:32 PM, EE wrote:
> I did not think that Snow Leopard was all that different from Leopard. A
> lot of Mac software that was made for Leopard works fine on Snow Leopard.

The way Apple does things is that they have some API X for doing
something in version N, then they introduce a different API Y for doing
it in version N+1, then they get rid of X entirely in version N+2.

So it's easy to support both N and N+1: use X.

It's easy to support both N+1 and N+2: use Y.

The problems come when you want to support all three.

In particular, software written for N will typically work on N+1, but
not on N+2, if it happens to use any API that got deprecated in N+1. We
use a very wide variety of APIs, of course. Much more than many other
pieces of software.

In our case, N == Leopard, N+1 == Snow Leopard, N+2 == Lion.

Supporting both Leopard and Snow Leopard is ok (though we have a bunch
of major features on Snow Leopard that are not available on Leopard due
to OS bugs).

Supporting all three is pretty difficult.

Supporting just Snow Leopard and Lion would be much easier.

Make sense?

Compare this to Microsoft, which would pretty much never get rid of API
X in the above scenario, so software which used it can keep using it.

-Boris

[EE]

Kind of makes sense, but since Firefox is currently supporting Leopard,
Snow Leopard, and Lion, why not keep doing that?

How is it that TenFourFox is able to support PPC Macs all the way up to
the current Firefox version, but not Intel Macs?

[Ron Hunter]

The question of supporting legacy hardware/OS is one of ROI. How many
users do you lose vs how much time and effort is required to continue
support. As some point, users just HAVE to upgrade, or be left with a
computer that is less and less useful on the internet.

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 12/23/11 2:42 PM, EE wrote:
> Kind of makes sense, but since Firefox is currently supporting Leopard,
> Snow Leopard, and Lion, why not keep doing that?

Because it's taking a huge amount of work to do that. That's precisely
the problem: support for Leopard is not free. It takes active work to
make it happen.

> How is it that TenFourFox is able to support PPC Macs all the way up to
> the current Firefox version, but not Intel Macs?

I have no idea what you're asking there.

-Boris

[Matthew Turnbull]

TenFourFox is a 3rd party build targeted at Mac OSX PPC support.
http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

Yes, they're managing it. However:
* They're maintaining a 3MB+ patch set, which grows with each release.
* Many features are compromised or completely disabled (hardware
acceleration, WebGL, font support, plugins)
* There's a lot of custom work (javascript, video rendering).

Sounds like a losing battle for an ever decreasing market share.

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> dev-apps-firefox mailing list
> dev-apps...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-apps-firefox
>

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Scaled for your pleasure.

[EE]

People who have the Motorola PPC CPU in their Macs (rather than Intel)
can keep a browser current, right up to the latest version by using
TenFourFox instead of Firefox. Firefox since version 4 is, I believe,
Intel-only. PPC Mac OS goes up to Leopard, but not beyond if I remember
correctly.

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 12/24/11 1:17 PM, EE wrote:
> People who have the Motorola PPC CPU in their Macs (rather than Intel)
> can keep a browser current, right up to the latest version by using
> TenFourFox instead of Firefox. Firefox since version 4 is, I believe,
> Intel-only. PPC Mac OS goes up to Leopard, but not beyond if I remember
> correctly.

OK. Those are statements, and they look true (modulo the fact that the
feature set of TenFourFox is much smaller than Firefox).

What's the question, then?

-Boris

[EE]

You partially answered the question (smaller feature set). I guess that
procedure of keeping TenFourFox up to date is easier for a PPC CPU than
for an Intel CPU?

[Matthew Turnbull]

You're talking about 2 different things. Supporting multiple CPU
architectures is a different headache than supporting different OS
versions. The smaller feature-set, that BZ and I referred to, mostly had
to do with OS API support. That doesn't have anything to do with CPU arch.

But there are areas in Firefox that are dependent on the CPU arch. The
back-ends for the various JavaScript JIT compilers are specific to an
arch, since they're generating CPU instructions. And many other
performance optimizations make use of assembly (SSE 1, 2, 3?). So they
need separate implementations for each arch (or you do without).

There are also issues supporting multiple version of an arch. This is
the problem TenFourFox is running into with Firefox 10 (
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2011/12/is-fx10-esr.html ), where a
needed instruction isn't available on the G3 or G4. The G5 was
introduced in 2003. But IA32/x86/amd64 isn't really any better off. I
believe that Firefox is targeting SSE2, which launched for Intel on 2001
and for AMD in 2003.

But, in the case of older Mac OS X support, I think it's clear that
Mozilla didn't think it was worth the cost to support a neutered
product. PPC its self is not really the issue. Many Linux distros that
support PPC (i.e. Gentoo), do provide current builds of Firefox. They
just sacrifice performance (not feature) improvements (JavaScript
JIT/Jaegermonkey/Type Inference). Adding modern PPC support in these
areas would probably not be that terribly difficult. However, I think
the issue is more of some actually supporting it over time.

> You partially answered the question (smaller feature set). I guess
> that procedure of keeping TenFourFox up to date is easier for a PPC
> CPU than for an Intel CPU?

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 12/24/11 2:00 PM, EE wrote:
> You partially answered the question (smaller feature set). I guess that
> procedure of keeping TenFourFox up to date is easier for a PPC CPU than
> for an Intel CPU?

I think you're a bit confused, actually.

TenFourFox supports exactly two OS versions: 10.4 and 10.5. It does not
support anything newer than 10.5.

If we wanted to just support 10.5 with the feature set of TenFourFox, we
could obviously do it.

The problems, again, start when you try to support both 10.7 and 10.5 at
the same time. Something that TenFourFox is not even trying to do.

Nothing to do with PPC vs Intel.

-Boris

[Philip Chee]

On Sun, 25 Dec 2011 08:31:46 -0500, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> On 12/24/11 2:00 PM, EE wrote:
>> You partially answered the question (smaller feature set). I guess that
>> procedure of keeping TenFourFox up to date is easier for a PPC CPU than
>> for an Intel CPU?
>
> I think you're a bit confused, actually.
>
> TenFourFox supports exactly two OS versions: 10.4 and 10.5. It does not
> support anything newer than 10.5.
>
> If we wanted to just support 10.5 with the feature set of TenFourFox, we
> could obviously do it.

(re: SeaMonkey 2.6/Firefox 9)
"4 files changes and I'm running on a G4 PPC OS X 10.5.8"
<http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2392355>

I wonder if this person has missed out several other things.

> The problems, again, start when you try to support both 10.7 and 10.5 at
> the same time. Something that TenFourFox is not even trying to do.
>
> Nothing to do with PPC vs Intel.
>
> -Boris

Phil

--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.

[EE]

That was not what I meant. I was referring to TenFourFox itself,
looking like Firefox. Would having it simulate the latest Firefox be
harder for Intel CPUs compared to PPC CPUs?

[EE]

But for TenFourFox itself, apparently supporting Intel Mac OS Tiger is
out of the question? I have an Intel Mac that is running Tiger, and I
cannot go beyond Firefox 3.6.*.

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 12/25/11 1:50 PM, EE wrote:
> Would having it simulate the latest Firefox be harder for
> Intel CPUs compared to PPC CPUs?

It'd take a bunch more work, I suspect, yes.

-Boris

[Matthew Turnbull]

The entire mission of TenFourFox is to provide PPC specific builds. It's
not a matter of how easy it would be; they seem to have no interest...
And, I get the distinct impression they don't think very highly of the
Intel platform.

But, as for releasing an Intel version of Firefox for 10.4, I'd think
it'd be simpler and less neutered than a PPC version. They'd only have
to worry about the API changes. The PPC builds also need to deal with
the CPU arch changes.

On 12/25/2011 02:00 PM, EE wrote:
> But for TenFourFox itself, apparently supporting Intel Mac OS Tiger is
> out of the question? I have an Intel Mac that is running Tiger, and I
> cannot go beyond Firefox 3.6.*.