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

[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]

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

[Masatoshi Kimura]

On 2016/03/11 3:03, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> 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.

Some fullscreen tests are enabled only on 10.6:
https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/tests/mochitest/chrome/chrome.ini#40

This proposal will virtually disable the fullscreen tests on OS X.

[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:

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

[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

[Ryan VanderMeulen]

On 3/10/2016 5:47 PM, Masatoshi Kimura wrote:
>
> Some fullscreen tests are enabled only on 10.6:
> https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/tests/mochitest/chrome/chrome.ini#40
>
> This proposal will virtually disable the fullscreen tests on OS X.
>

|skip-if = os != 'mac' || os_version == '10.6'| reads to me that
they're running on OSX 10.10 and nowhere else. A cursory look at the
Treeherder logs supports my interpretation of that condition.

-Ryan

[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

[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

> This also provides a decent workaround that our support community can
> recommend in documentation and the forums.
>
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Ryan VanderMeulen <

> rvande...@mozilla.com> 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.
> >

> _______________________________________________
> 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.

[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

> On Mar 10, 2016, at 17:17, Trevor Saunders <tbsa...@tbsaunde.org> 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?
>

[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++.

Mike

[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

[Ryan VanderMeulen]

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?
> 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”.

Past experience suggests that things rapidly break when we aren't
building/testing them in automation. I think the B2G folks can attest to
that most-recently.

[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?

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 4:01 PM, Tyler Downer <tdo...@mozilla.com> 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.

> This also provides a decent workaround that our support community can
> recommend in documentation and the forums.
>
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Ryan VanderMeulen <
> rvande...@mozilla.com> 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.
>>
>> 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 is notice of an intent to deprecate support within Firefox for the
>>> > following old versions of MacOS: 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8
>>> >

[Kyle Huey]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 2:03 AM, 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
>
> 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
>

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

[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.

Mike

[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.

On 3/10/16, Trevor Saunders <tbsa...@tbsaunde.org> 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?
>
> Trev
>

>> This also provides a decent workaround that our support community can
>> recommend in documentation and the forums.
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Ryan VanderMeulen <
>> rvande...@mozilla.com> 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.
>> >
>> > On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 5:25 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
>> >

>> >> 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
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> firefox-dev mailing list
>> >> firef...@mozilla.org
>> >> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > firefox-dev mailing list
>> > firef...@mozilla.org
>> > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> Tyler Downer
>> Project Manager, User Advocacy

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

[Hubert Figuière]

On 10/03/16 06:17 PM, Trevor Saunders wrote:
> given they haven't upgraded from 10.6 - 10.8 why do you believe they are
> likely to in the future?

1. their machine can die and they'll replace it with a new one that will
come with the latest MacOS, and restore their data from a Time Machine
backup.

2. they have some software that is important that require an update so
they will update - and since only updating to that latest OS is easy,
that's what they'll pick.

Hub

[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

[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:

>
>

> 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
>
>

[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

[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

>
> 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

[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

> 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:
>
> >
> >
> > 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.
> >

[Bobby Holley]

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%.

[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

[Bobby Holley]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 10:51 AM, Chris Hofmann <chof...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

> 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
>

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

On 11/03/2016 11:31, Nathan Froyd wrote:

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

[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

[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

[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

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:

> 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

[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 3/12/2016 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.

--BDS

[Gabor Krizsanits]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 8:51 PM, Benjamin Smedberg <benj...@smedbergs.us>
wrote:

>
>

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

[yuhong...@hotmail.com]

Though in this case, the main competitor (Chrome) would also be dropping support. In fact they are even worse in that they are dropping all pre-Win7 platforms while I proposed dropping support for only XP SP2.

[Ralph Giles]

Discussion seems to have wound down. Is there a decision on this?

-r

[cece...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, March 10, 2016 at 12:04:03 PM UTC-6, 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%
>

> 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

I am on 10.6.8 with no plan to upgrade soon. Every beta version beyond v 44.0b9 causes screen freezes and very slow operation for me. Where do I find the ESR update?

[Lawrence Mandel]

Before you update, can I introduce you to Milan, who leads our graphics
team, so that he might be able to work with you to get some diagnostic
information that can help us identify the cuase of the freezes and slowness?

When you're ready,

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

Lawrence

[cece...@gmail.com]

Hello,

What information do you want, Milan?

Christine

From: Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com>
Date: Friday, Apr 1, 2016 11:05 AM
To: C Reed <cece...@gmail.com>
Cc: dev-platform <dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org>, "Sreckovic, Milan"
<msrec...@mozilla.com>
Subject: Re: Intent to deprecate: MacOS 10.6-10.8 support

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 11:48 AM, <cece...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Nathan Froyd]

Re-ping on this thread. It would be really useful to have a decision
one way or the other for figuring out exactly how a C++11 STL on OS X
is going to work.

-Nathan

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 12:51 PM, Ralph Giles <gi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Discussion seems to have wound down. Is there a decision on this?
>
> -r

[ad...@imgland.xyz]

Doesn't hombrew provide a version of g++ that includes c++11

04.04.2016, 18:12, "Nathan Froyd" <nfr...@mozilla.com>:

> Re-ping on this thread. It would be really useful to have a decision
> one way or the other for figuring out exactly how a C++11 STL on OS X
> is going to work.
>
> -Nathan
>
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 12:51 PM, Ralph Giles <gi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>  Discussion seems to have wound down. Is there a decision on this?
>>
>>   -r

[Anthony Hughes]

Hi Christine,

I'm not sure if you got help yet for the performance issue you're
experiencing. If not I may be able to offer some assistance starting on
Monday.

Please email me back.

--
Anthony Hughes
Sr. Quality Engineer, Platform (GFX)
Mozilla Coroporation

[Nicolas Silva]

Re-re-ping.
Being able to use a more recent standard library would simplify a lot of
things on our end. For example updating 3rd party libraries such as
skia, which depends on a modern stl, is a pain, and there are plenty of
other examples.

Cheers,

Nical

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016, at 07:33 PM, ad...@imgland.xyz wrote:
> Doesn't hombrew provide a version of g++ that includes c++11
>
> 04.04.2016, 18:12, "Nathan Froyd" <nfr...@mozilla.com>:
> > Re-ping on this thread. It would be really useful to have a decision
> > one way or the other for figuring out exactly how a C++11 STL on OS X
> > is going to work.
> >
> > -Nathan
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 12:51 PM, Ralph Giles <gi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> >>  Discussion seems to have wound down. Is there a decision on this?
> >>
> >>   -r

[Milan Sreckovic]

Release engineering is working on this decision, stay tuned.
—
- Milan

> On Apr 19, 2016, at 12:02 , Nicolas Silva <nical...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Re-re-ping.
> Being able to use a more recent standard library would simplify a lot of
> things on our end. For example updating 3rd party libraries such as
> skia, which depends on a modern stl, is a pain, and there are plenty of
> other examples.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Nical
>
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016, at 07:33 PM, ad...@imgland.xyz wrote:
>> Doesn't hombrew provide a version of g++ that includes c++11
>>
>> 04.04.2016, 18:12, "Nathan Froyd" <nfr...@mozilla.com>:
>>> Re-ping on this thread. It would be really useful to have a decision
>>> one way or the other for figuring out exactly how a C++11 STL on OS X
>>> is going to work.
>>>
>>> -Nathan
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 12:51 PM, Ralph Giles <gi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>>> Discussion seems to have wound down. Is there a decision on this?
>>>>
>>>> -r

[Kohei Yoshino]

Today's announcement from Mozilla:
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/29/update-on-firefox-support-for-os-x/

The decision is fine but why don't they update this thread? (I know, Mozilla is very bad at communication.)

-Kohei

[Lawrence Mandel]

Hi Kohei,

I had planned to update the thread after the post went live so that I had
the link. Thank you for posting it.

Lawrence

On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 12:38 AM, Kohei Yoshino <kohei....@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Mike Hommey]

On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 12:38:37AM -0400, Kohei Yoshino wrote:
> Today's announcement from Mozilla:
> https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/29/update-on-firefox-support-for-os-x/
>
> The decision is fine but why don't they update this thread? (I know, Mozilla is very bad at communication.)

So we're telling users that they can ... downgrade Firefox (since they
just received an upgrade)? How is that fine?

Mike

[Lawrence Mandel]

> I assume you mean that ESR is still supported. If so, that message is
there to head off any questions about whether Mozilla has changed support
for ESR mid cycle. It is certainly plausible that OSX 10.6-10.8 users will
want to move to ESR to continue receiving sec updates for the next ~year.
Should we have made this decision and announced it before the 46 release? I
would have liked that. The timing certainly seems better. Should we
continue supporting OSX 10.6-10.8 in Firefox until mid 2017 because we
didn't make this decision a few months ago? I don't think so.

Lawrence

[Ralph Giles]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 9:52 PM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> I had planned to update the thread after the post went live so that I had
> the link. Thank you for posting it.

The blog post just says "August 2016". Firefox 48 is scheduled for
release August 2. Can you confirm that means we can start removing
10.6-10.8 support in mozilla-central now, which will be Firefox 49?

-r

[Lawrence Mandel]

Yes. Confirmed.

Lawrence

[Gregory Szorc]

\o/

So this presumably means we can turn off automation running on 10.6-10.8 on
mozilla-central? I believe that will drastically increase our OS X
automation capacity...

So where does that leave us on Universal OS X builds? IIRC our blocker is
the need to support 32-bit Silverlight in the plugin container so various
streaming services using it don't break. Where are we on that front?
(Reminder: killing Universal OS X packages will make automation builds
significantly faster and will reduce the DMG size by almost half.)

[Ralph Giles]

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 4:10 PM, Gregory Szorc <g...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> So this presumably means we can turn off automation running on 10.6-10.8 on
> mozilla-central? I believe that will drastically increase our OS X
> automation capacity...

Yes, please. We can't take advantage of any of the engineering
benefits until we stop gating builds on tests passing on 10.6.

> So where does that leave us on Universal OS X builds? IIRC our blocker is
> the need to support 32-bit Silverlight in the plugin container so various
> streaming services using it don't break. Where are we on that front?

Mac has EME-based support for DMCA-protected video starting in Firefox
47[1], so there's an alternative to Silverlight for those sites. There
are other uses of course, but we have previously announced an end to
native NPAPI plugins at the end of 2016[2] so I think that's the
timeframe for dropping 32-bit mac support. If we want to make progress
in the meantime we should start doing separate 64-bit only builds, and
use the update process to transition users on Mac > 10.6 who don't
have 32-bit plugins to the new 64-bit builds.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/08/mozilla-to-test-widevine-cdm-in-firefox-nightly/
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/

[Gregory Szorc]

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 4:10 PM, Gregory Szorc <g...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 3:51 PM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 2:28 PM, Ralph Giles <gi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>
>> > On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 9:52 PM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > > I had planned to update the thread after the post went live so that I
>> had
>> > > the link. Thank you for posting it.
>> >
>> > The blog post just says "August 2016". Firefox 48 is scheduled for
>> > release August 2. Can you confirm that means we can start removing
>> > 10.6-10.8 support in mozilla-central now, which will be Firefox 49?
>> >
>>
>> Yes. Confirmed.
>>
>
> \o/
>

> So this presumably means we can turn off automation running on 10.6-10.8
> on mozilla-central? I believe that will drastically increase our OS X
> automation capacity...
>

I filed bug 1269542 to remove 10.6-10.8 jobs from tier-1 and bug 1269543 to
remove the jobs from automation scheduling.

>
> So where does that leave us on Universal OS X builds? IIRC our blocker is
> the need to support 32-bit Silverlight in the plugin container so various
> streaming services using it don't break. Where are we on that front?

[Chris Peterson]

On 5/2/16 4:10 PM, Gregory Szorc wrote:
> So where does that leave us on Universal OS X builds? IIRC our blocker is
> the need to support 32-bit Silverlight in the plugin container so various
> streaming services using it don't break. Where are we on that front?
> (Reminder: killing Universal OS X packages will make automation builds
> significantly faster and will reduce the DMG size by almost half.)

I don't know the status of 32-bit Silverlight on OS X, but we're
shipping Widevine support in Firefox 47 (for Windows 7+ and OS X 10.6+).
Streaming services will have an easy migration path from Silverlight to
their existing Widevine player code.

That said, I don't expect the long-tail of streaming services to
complete this transition before the end of 2016, when we already plan to
drop NPAPI plugins.

[Gregory Szorc]

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 5:12 PM, Chris Peterson <cpet...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

Fair enough.

So what's the last Firefox release to support NPAPI plugins? 50? 51?

[Chris Peterson]

We're tentatively planning to remove NPAPI support (for plugins other
than Flash) in 53 because 52 is the next ESR. We'd like ESR 52 to
support NPAPI as a transition option for enterprise users that rely on Java.

[Ted Mielczarek]

On Mon, May 2, 2016, at 08:26 PM, Chris Peterson wrote:
> We're tentatively planning to remove NPAPI support (for plugins other
> than Flash) in 53 because 52 is the next ESR. We'd like ESR 52 to
> support NPAPI as a transition option for enterprise users that rely on
> Java.

Then we should plan to drop Universal builds in the same release,
because without supporting 10.6 or 32-bit NPAPI plugins, the 32-bit half
of the build is just cruft. Is there a bug tracking NPAPI removal?

-Ted

[Xidorn Quan]

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 7:48 PM, Ted Mielczarek <t...@mielczarek.org> wrote:

> On Mon, May 2, 2016, at 08:26 PM, Chris Peterson wrote:

> > We're tentatively planning to remove NPAPI support (for plugins other
> > than Flash) in 53 because 52 is the next ESR. We'd like ESR 52 to
> > support NPAPI as a transition option for enterprise users that rely on
> > Java.
>

> Then we should plan to drop Universal builds in the same release,
> because without supporting 10.6 or 32-bit NPAPI plugins, the 32-bit half
> of the build is just cruft. Is there a bug tracking NPAPI removal?

Once we drop Silverlight support on OS X, we can fix bug 846566 \o/

- Xidorn

[Gregory Szorc]

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 4:10 PM, Gregory Szorc <g...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 3:51 PM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com>

> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 2:28 PM, Ralph Giles <gi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>
>> > On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 9:52 PM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > > I had planned to update the thread after the post went live so that I
>> had
>> > > the link. Thank you for posting it.
>> >
>> > The blog post just says "August 2016". Firefox 48 is scheduled for
>> > release August 2. Can you confirm that means we can start removing
>> > 10.6-10.8 support in mozilla-central now, which will be Firefox 49?
>> >
>>
>> Yes. Confirmed.
>>
>
> \o/
>
> So this presumably means we can turn off automation running on 10.6-10.8
> on mozilla-central? I believe that will drastically increase our OS X
> automation capacity...
>

A number of actions have already been performed to formalize the
deprecation of these OS X versions:

* Treeherder no longer shows tests running on <10.9
* The minimum OS X target version has been bumped to 10.7 meaning that
builds will shortly not work on 10.6 (bug 1269790) (see bug for why 10.7
and not 10.9)
* The update server has been reconfigured to not serve Nightly updates to
10.6-10.8 (bug 1269811)

[Justin Dolske]

On 5/3/16 12:21 PM, Gregory Szorc wrote:

> * The update server has been reconfigured to not serve Nightly updates to
> 10.6-10.8 (bug 1269811)

Are we going to be showing some kind of notice to affected users upon
Release? That is, if I'm a 10.6 user and I update to Firefox 48, at some
point should I see a message saying I'll no longer receive future updates?

Justin

[Robert Strong]

App update has the ability to show the user a message that the system is no
longer supported based on the update.xml served by release engineering.

Robert

[Adam Roach]

Even better, is there any way to get the update system to automatically
move such users over to 45ESR?

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

[Robert Strong]

It can be done with a one-off update mar file that includes the files that
aren't included in an update.

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Adam Roach <a...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On 5/3/16 4:59 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:
>

> Even better, is there any way to get the update system to automatically
> move such users over to 45ESR?
>
> --
> Adam Roach
> Principal Platform Engineer
> a...@mozilla.com
> +1 650 903 0800 x863

[Chris Peterson]

On 5/3/16 3:11 AM, Xidorn Quan wrote:
>> > Then we should plan to drop Universal builds in the same release,
>> > because without supporting 10.6 or 32-bit NPAPI plugins, the 32-bit half
>> > of the build is just cruft.

That doesn't mean we can't remove 32-bit NPAPI support on OS X sooner
than 53. Most enterprises are probably using Windows and not 32-bit OS X.

bsmedberg's OS version dashboard (for Firefox 42 in November 2015) says
only 1.4% of OS X users were running 32-bit Firefox. btw, 16.5% of OS X
users were still running 10.6.

http://bsmedberg.github.io/telemetry-dashboard/new-pipeline/active-weekly.html

> Is there a bug tracking NPAPI removal?

No, so I just filed bug 1269807 (Bugzilla alias "remove-npapi"). Feel
free to add relevant blocking or blocked bugs.

> Once we drop Silverlight support on OS X, we can fix bug 846566 \o/

Thanks. I made the "remove-npapi" bug block bug 846566 as a reminder.

[Mike Hommey]

On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 05:18:17PM -0500, Adam Roach wrote:
> On 5/3/16 4:59 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:

> Even better, is there any way to get the update system to automatically move
> such users over to 45ESR?

Did we introduce changes to profile data between 45 and 48? Because
that usually breaks downgrade paths.

Mike

[Gregory Szorc]

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 3:53 PM, Chris Peterson <cpet...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

> On 5/3/16 3:11 AM, Xidorn Quan wrote:
>
>> > Then we should plan to drop Universal builds in the same release,
>>> > because without supporting 10.6 or 32-bit NPAPI plugins, the 32-bit
>>> half
>>> > of the build is just cruft.
>>>
>>
> That doesn't mean we can't remove 32-bit NPAPI support on OS X sooner than
> 53. Most enterprises are probably using Windows and not 32-bit OS X.
>
> bsmedberg's OS version dashboard (for Firefox 42 in November 2015) says
> only 1.4% of OS X users were running 32-bit Firefox. btw, 16.5% of OS X
> users were still running 10.6.
>
>
> http://bsmedberg.github.io/telemetry-dashboard/new-pipeline/active-weekly.html
>

IIRC the problem isn't that people are running 32-bit Firefox it is that
certain plugins only have 32-bit versions. So e.g. a 64-bit OS X 10.10 is
still running a 32-bit plugin process for certain plugins.

I think the data we need is how many users are running 32-bit NPAPI
processes on OS X > 10.8 (only the 10.9+ population is relevant because
we've dropped 10.6-10.8). Then we can have a conversation about dropping
32-bit NPAPI on OS X before 53.

>
>
> Is there a bug tracking NPAPI removal?
>>
>
> No, so I just filed bug 1269807 (Bugzilla alias "remove-npapi"). Feel free
> to add relevant blocking or blocked bugs.
>
>
> Once we drop Silverlight support on OS X, we can fix bug 846566 \o/
>>
>
> Thanks. I made the "remove-npapi" bug block bug 846566 as a reminder.
>

[Lawrence Mandel]

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 6:56 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:

> On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 05:18:17PM -0500, Adam Roach wrote:
> > On 5/3/16 4:59 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:

> > Even better, is there any way to get the update system to automatically
> move
> > such users over to 45ESR?
>
> Did we introduce changes to profile data between 45 and 48? Because
> that usually breaks downgrade paths.
>

We discussed this earlier and decided that we were not going to
automatically move users from Firefox to ESR. For one thing, the user has
not opted to be on this channel. A channel change also involves both
engineering and test work. It does seem prudent to test the scenario to
know whether users can move from 47 to ESR 45.2.0 without issue.

Lawrence

[Xidorn Quan]

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 6:56 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 05:18:17PM -0500, Adam Roach wrote:
> > > On 5/3/16 4:59 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:

> > > Even better, is there any way to get the update system to automatically
> > move
> > > such users over to 45ESR?
> >
> > Did we introduce changes to profile data between 45 and 48? Because
> > that usually breaks downgrade paths.
> >
>
> We discussed this earlier and decided that we were not going to
> automatically move users from Firefox to ESR. For one thing, the user has
> not opted to be on this channel. A channel change also involves both
> engineering and test work. It does seem prudent to test the scenario to
> know whether users can move from 47 to ESR 45.2.0 without issue.

Is it feasible to make 48 an ESR as well so that we don't need to ask users
to downgrade it to ESR 45?

- Xidorn

[Lawrence Mandel]

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 11:11 PM, Xidorn Quan <quanx...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 6:56 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
>>
>> > On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 05:18:17PM -0500, Adam Roach wrote:
>> > > On 5/3/16 4:59 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:

>> > > Even better, is there any way to get the update system to
>> automatically
>> > move
>> > > such users over to 45ESR?
>> >
>> > Did we introduce changes to profile data between 45 and 48? Because
>> > that usually breaks downgrade paths.
>> >
>>
>> We discussed this earlier and decided that we were not going to
>> automatically move users from Firefox to ESR. For one thing, the user has
>> not opted to be on this channel. A channel change also involves both
>> engineering and test work. It does seem prudent to test the scenario to
>> know whether users can move from 47 to ESR 45.2.0 without issue.
>
>
> Is it feasible to make 48 an ESR as well so that we don't need to ask
> users to downgrade it to ESR 45?
>

I don't think so. I also don't know that we're going to recommend that
users migrate to ESR (need to verify that there are no incompatible profile
changes) although that is certainly an option.

Lawrence

[Ben Hearsum]

This is the plan in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1269811. I'll be doing this
for Nightly users shortly (right now they're just getting no update if
they're on yesterday's build), and we'll do it for other channels as well.

[Henri Sivonen]

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 1:51 AM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>> The blog post just says "August 2016". Firefox 48 is scheduled for
>> release August 2. Can you confirm that means we can start removing
>> 10.6-10.8 support in mozilla-central now, which will be Firefox 49?
>
> Yes. Confirmed.

Hooray for a more vanilla Rust compiler config! Thank you!

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 2:10 AM, Gregory Szorc <g...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> So where does that leave us on Universal OS X builds? IIRC our blocker is
> the need to support 32-bit Silverlight in the plugin container so various
> streaming services using it don't break.

Indeed.

As noted up-thread, the availability of the Widevine CDM (as of
Firefox 47) provides a migration path for Silverlight-using sites.
Supporting Firefox via Widevine should be particularly easy for sites
that have already adopted Widevine in order to support Chrome after
Chrome dropped Silverlight and have moved to unprefixed promise-based
EME so as to keep working in Chrome 50. As a success anecdote,
Bitmovin's player did the Right Thing by feature sniffing instead of
browser sniffing, so their player Just Works without Firefox-specific
changes. See http://www.dash-player.com/demo/drm-test-area/ for demo.
(Services that use Widevine with WebM [Microsoft Azure is a known
example] don't work yet. EME support for WebM support is
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=webm-eme)

I encourage people who have @mozilla.com Google Docs access to add the
Silverlight-using movie streaming services that they are aware of in
their country to
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/156hS5R42R8evZlMKIwnliNWidJpqH2HDINvrjyqMVFE/edit
so that migration off Silverlight can be tracked.

There appear to be a couple of non-intranet non-video
Silverlight-using sites in Japan. Obviously, Widevine doesn't address
Java-esque use of Silverlight, but it's relatively rare outside
intranets generally.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsiv...@hsivonen.fi
https://hsivonen.fi/

[Kyle Huey]

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 8:23 PM, <sfbay.m...@gmail.com> wrote:

> (Note: Please see "OSX Support Cycle" below.)
>
> These are important decisions. However, expecting all end-users to be able
> to handle a manual migration to ESR, or understand what is happening or why
> is somewhat flawed. I believe downgrading should NOT be considered as an
> option, except for tech savvy users.
>
> The best option, from my perspective (supporting a wide array of users, OS
> versions, hardware), is to make the final 10.6-10.8 version be (or become)
> the next ESR with a startup page providing them with the choice and action
> buttons/links. Subsequent startups would load follow-up startup pages with
> the appropriate reminders.
>
> The pages should explain very simply and succinctly that no new features
> will be coming and only security updates/patches will be made until "X"
> date when support ends (but the browser will still be usable). The first
> page should be VERY overt and obnoxious. The 2nd, 3rd, etc. can be more
> like what Google Chrome did recently (ie. notice bar at top of the content
> area).
>
> SIDEBAR: "OSX Support Cycle"
>
> While we are on this subject, what is the plan for Firefox support of 10.9
> later this year when Apple pushes out its latest OSX? How about a year from
> now when 10.10 support ends? Where does the annual Firefox/OSX support
> depreciation end?
>
> Apple has shifted to warp speed with their rapid release cycle. Every
> version of Windows has a minimum 10 year support lifecycle (security
> patches, etc.) OSX now has 3.
>
> If Mozilla and other developers simply follow Apple's "not supported"
> timeline, there will be a growing number of end users who will be left out.
> Where do you think they will go? If they migrate to Windows there is a much
> greater chance they will stick with Edge or whatever is there and leave
> Firefox behind.
>

We *don't* follow Apple's timeline though. Snow Leopard was dropped by
Apple back in 2013. Mozilla's decisions are driven by considering, among
other factors, how many users remain on that platform and the engineering
difficulty of continuing to support it.

- Kyle

[sfbay.m...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, May 3, 2016 at 8:32:26 PM UTC-7, Lawrence Mandel wrote:
> On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 11:11 PM, Xidorn Quan wrote:
>
> > On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Lawrence Mandel wrote:

(Note: Please see "OSX Support Cycle" below.)

These are important decisions. However, expecting all end-users to be able to handle a manual migration to ESR, or understand what is happening or why seems like a bad idea. I believe downgrading should NOT be considered as an option, except for tech savvy users.

There are three options that OSX 10.6-10.8 users have with Firefox:
1. Upgrade their OS (not possible for some)
2. Install ESR (temporary fix that could create problems if they can do #1 later)
3. Continue using the unsupported Firefox (and hope they are not hit by a security vulnerability)
4. Stop using Firefox

From my perspective, the best option for those who cannot upgrade their OS, is to make the final 10.6-10.8 version be (or become) the next ESR. I have found, repeatedly, that if there is a chance for users to mis-read/mis-understand/confuse instructions, they will. Don't complicate their lives any more than they already are. Give them a simple choice. "Click here to upgrade to ESR".

Make sure that adequate startup pages are created to communicate these changes in as concise a manner as possible. Provide links for further detail. Subsequent startups should load follow-up pages with reminders, perhaps reduced to a notice bar (like what Google Chrome did recently).


SIDEBAR: "OSX Support Cycle" ...

While we are on this subject, what is the plan for Firefox support of 10.9 later this year when Apple pushes out its latest OSX? How about a year from now when 10.10 support ends? Where does the annual Firefox/OSX support depreciation end?

Apple has shifted to warp speed with their rapid release cycle. Every version of Windows has a minimum 10 year support lifecycle (security patches, etc.) OSX now has 3.

If Mozilla and other developers simply follow Apple's "not supported" timeline, there will be a growing number of end users who will be left out. Where do you think they will go? If they migrate to Windows there is a much greater chance they will stick with Edge or whatever is there and leave Firefox behind.

I have been a long-time Firefox advocate. I hope to continue this but am uncertain where the Firefox support path is going...

[Chris Peterson]

On 5/5/16 8:23 PM, sfbay.m...@gmail.com wrote:
> The best option, from my perspective (supporting a wide array of users, OS versions, hardware), is to make the final 10.6-10.8 version be (or become) the next ESR with a startup page providing them with the choice and action buttons/links.

Making the upcoming final 10.6–10.8 release (Firefox 47?) an ESR is an
interesting idea. It's a unfortunate that ESR 45 was just released.
Enterprises may already be deploying ESR 45 and not want to test and
deploy another ESR so soon.

[Xidorn Quan]

On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 5:39 PM, Chris Peterson <cpet...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

It's Firefox 48, three versions after ESR 45, which is roughly halfway
before the next ESR.

Could we probably make Firefox 48 a half-ESR, whose support term is
extended to the end of ESR 45, so that people don't need to downgrade to
ESR 45 to get security updates for the rest of the time, and enterprises
don't need to deploy this version if they do not have many affected
machines.

- Xidorn

[Mike Hommey]

On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 06:01:12PM +1000, Xidorn Quan wrote:
> On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 5:39 PM, Chris Peterson <cpet...@mozilla.com>
> wrote:
>

> It's Firefox 48, three versions after ESR 45, which is roughly halfway
> before the next ESR.

48 is the first version that will *not* have 10.6-10.8 support.

Mike

[Xidorn Quan]

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 2:28 PM, Ralph Giles <gi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> The blog post just says "August 2016". Firefox 48 is scheduled for
> release August 2. Can you confirm that means we can start removing
> 10.6-10.8 support in mozilla-central now, which will be Firefox 49?

This post reads to me that we start dropping 10.6~10.8 since Firefox 49, so
Firefox 48 should be the last one with that support. Am I missing something
here?

- Xidorn

[Lawrence Mandel]

On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 6:43 AM, Xidorn Quan <quanx...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 8:24 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 06:01:12PM +1000, Xidorn Quan wrote:
> > >
> > > It's Firefox 48, three versions after ESR 45, which is roughly halfway
> > > before the next ESR.
> >
> > 48 is the first version that will *not* have 10.6-10.8 support.
>
>

> On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 2:28 PM, Ralph Giles <gi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> > The blog post just says "August 2016". Firefox 48 is scheduled for
> > release August 2. Can you confirm that means we can start removing
> > 10.6-10.8 support in mozilla-central now, which will be Firefox 49?
>

> This post reads to me that we start dropping 10.6~10.8 since Firefox 49, so
> Firefox 48 should be the last one with that support. Am I missing something
> here?
>

The post states "Mozilla will end support for Firefox on OS X 10.6, 10.7,
and 10.8 in August, 2016." This means that we will end support with the
Firefox 48 release. i.e. Firefox 48 will not support OS X 10.6-10.8.

Lawrence

[Mike Hommey]

That's why the post should have given a version number instead of an
ambiguous date.

Mike

[sfbay.m...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, May 10, 2016 at 8:07:05 PM UTC-7, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 10:58:25PM -0400, Lawrence Mandel wrote:

> > On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 6:43 AM, Xidorn Quan wrote:

> >
> > > On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 8:24 PM, Mike Hommey wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 06:01:12PM +1000, Xidorn Quan wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > It's Firefox 48, three versions after ESR 45, which is roughly halfway
> > > > > before the next ESR.
> > > >
> > > > 48 is the first version that will *not* have 10.6-10.8 support.
> > >
> > >
> > > On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 2:28 PM, Ralph Giles wrote:
> > > > The blog post just says "August 2016". Firefox 48 is scheduled for
> > > > release August 2. Can you confirm that means we can start removing
> > > > 10.6-10.8 support in mozilla-central now, which will be Firefox 49?
> > >
> > > This post reads to me that we start dropping 10.6~10.8 since Firefox 49, so
> > > Firefox 48 should be the last one with that support. Am I missing something
> > > here?
> > >
> >
> > The post states "Mozilla will end support for Firefox on OS X 10.6, 10.7,
> > and 10.8 in August, 2016." This means that we will end support with the
> > Firefox 48 release. i.e. Firefox 48 will not support OS X 10.6-10.8.
>
> That's why the post should have given a version number instead of an
> ambiguous date.
>
> Mike

I couldn't agree more. If you do not believe people can mix up and/or confuse what seems like an obvious statement or instructions, have a room full of college students read and explain it back to you.

Any word on the ESR issue?

[Nils Ohlmeier]

> On May 3, 2016, at 15:18, Adam Roach <a...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/3/16 4:59 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:

> Even better, is there any way to get the update system to automatically move such users over to 45ESR?

I agree. At least users should get updated to the latest version in their channel. If not automatically or getting pointed to manually switch to the latest secure release for their version/channel.

Right now I started a Nightly 40 on 10.6.8 and it simply refused to do any update at all. That is less then ideal I would say.

Best regards
Nils Ohlmeier

[Nils Ohlmeier]

> On May 10, 2016, at 19:58, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> The post states "Mozilla will end support for Firefox on OS X 10.6, 10.7,
> and 10.8 in August, 2016." This means that we will end support with the
> Firefox 48 release. i.e. Firefox 48 will not support OS X 10.6-10.8.

Why do Firefox DevEdition users on Mac OS X 10.6 then still get updates to DevEd 48?

I just tested it on a 10.6 machine and updates have stopped for Nightly. Which is good, because the Nightly 49 build which I manually downloaded crashes and brings up the Mac OS X crash reporter.
But the DevEdition installed on the same system updated itself to 48. And 48 started and appeared to be still working.

Best
Nils Ohlmeier

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Right now the code to disable 10.6 has landed only on nightly/49, and other
bits are still blocked (see bug 1270217) because our MacOS builders (not
the testers) are still running MacOS 10.7. As of this point, I expect that
Firefox 48 will still run on 10.6-10.8 and the first release to drop
support will be Fx49.

If anyone wants to follow along, the tracking bug for the various pieces of
client, updater, website, and SUMO changes are being tracked in bug 1255589.

--BDS

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 2:15 PM, Nils Ohlmeier <nohl...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Nils, feel free to file a bug on this and cc bhearsum. I don't know how
much work this would be.

--BDS

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 2:18 PM, Nils Ohlmeier <nohl...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

>

> > On May 3, 2016, at 15:18, Adam Roach <a...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 5/3/16 4:59 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:

> > Even better, is there any way to get the update system to automatically
> move such users over to 45ESR?
>
> I agree. At least users should get updated to the latest version in their
> channel. If not automatically or getting pointed to manually switch to the
> latest secure release for their version/channel.
>
> Right now I started a Nightly 40 on 10.6.8 and it simply refused to do any
> update at all. That is less then ideal I would say.
>
> Best regards

[Ben Hearsum]

Thanks for clarifying. It seems like the confusion came from the fact
that we had *intended* to drop support in 48.0, but it hadn't happened
yet. And now we don't *intend* to drop support until 49.0?

[Ben Hearsum]

This was discussed in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1269811#c7. It's
technically possible to do, but it didn't seem worthwhile on Nightly and
Aurora.

I intend to make sure that Beta/Release/ESR is configured in such a way
that users get the most up to date release possible. Eg: serve 10.6-10.8
users the latest 48.0 point release, then give them a deprecation notice.

[Lawrence Mandel]

Yes. The intention was 48.0. Given that that doesn't actually buy us
anything at this point, dropping support in 49.0 is fine.

Lawrence

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I didn't know we intended to drop support in 48. I just assumed 49 from
reading the blog post and knowing that things were just landing in nightly.
At this point, though, I don't want to do uplifts and would prefer that
this ride the 49 train.

--BDS

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 3:24 PM, Ben Hearsum <bhea...@mozilla.com> wrote:

[Adam Roach]

On 5/13/16 14:26, Ben Hearsum wrote:
> I intend to make sure that Beta/Release/ESR is configured in such a
> way that users get the most up to date release possible. Eg: serve
> 10.6-10.8 users the latest 48.0 point release, then give them a
> deprecation notice.

Presumably, the deprecation notice will mention ESR as a way to continue
to get security updates for several more months?


--
Adam Roach
Principal Platform Engineer
Office of the CTO

[Benjamin Smedberg]

The actual content of the page is not final, but I did include that
recommendation in my request for a SUMO page. See
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1270221

--BDS

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 4:59 PM, Adam Roach <a...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On 5/13/16 14:26, Ben Hearsum wrote:
>

>> I intend to make sure that Beta/Release/ESR is configured in such a way
>> that users get the most up to date release possible. Eg: serve 10.6-10.8
>> users the latest 48.0 point release, then give them a deprecation notice.
>>
>

> Presumably, the deprecation notice will mention ESR as a way to continue
> to get security updates for several more months?
>
>
> --
> Adam Roach
> Principal Platform Engineer
> Office of the CTO
>

[Henrik Skupin]

Mike Hommey wrote on 05/11/2016 05:06 AM:
>> The post states "Mozilla will end support for Firefox on OS X 10.6, 10.7,
>> and 10.8 in August, 2016." This means that we will end support with the
>> Firefox 48 release. i.e. Firefox 48 will not support OS X 10.6-10.8.
>
> That's why the post should have given a version number instead of an
> ambiguous date.

Bug 1269790 only landed on mozilla-central. Shouldn't it then also be
backported to mozilla-aurora so it will hit the 48.0 release?

--
Henrik

[Lawrence Mandel]

Given the confusion, we will drop support in 49.0.

Lawrence

[Xidorn Quan]

On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 2:19 AM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 12:11 PM, Henrik Skupin <ma...@hskupin.info> wrote:
>

> Given the confusion, we will drop support in 49.0.

Can we now make 48.0 a half-ESR? Firefox 49.0 starts to drop 10.6~10.8 as
well as machines which do not support SSE. Given we are still support them
with 45ESR, I think it makes sense to extend the support cycle of 48 to the
end of cycle of 45ESR.

- Xidorn

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I thought this was already asked and answered, but just to be clear.

We are not going to make any changes to the ESR schedule or make Firefox 48
any kind of long-term release. The development costs of maintaining another
branch are high, and not something we're willing to pay.

--BDS

On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 7:35 PM, Xidorn Quan <quanx...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 2:19 AM, Lawrence Mandel <lma...@mozilla.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 12:11 PM, Henrik Skupin <ma...@hskupin.info>
> wrote:
> >

> > Given the confusion, we will drop support in 49.0.
>
>
> Can we now make 48.0 a half-ESR? Firefox 49.0 starts to drop 10.6~10.8 as
> well as machines which do not support SSE. Given we are still support them
> with 45ESR, I think it makes sense to extend the support cycle of 48 to the
> end of cycle of 45ESR.
>
> - Xidorn

[Chris Pearce]

What will the behaviour be for users on unsupported MacOSX versions?

It sounds like existing users won't get updated to a non-supported version.

What about users to try to install Firefox on an unsupported MacOS version? Will the installer show some sort of notification/dialog box saying that their OS is unsupported? Or will Firefox just fail to start or crash mysteriously?


cpearce.



On Friday, March 11, 2016 at 7:04:03 AM UTC+13, 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%
>
> 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

[Robert Strong]

Users won't get updated to an unsupported version and they will be notified
that their system is no longer supported. The notification includes an url
to a page for additional information.

I'm not familiar with the Mac installer but since it is just a dmg I don't
know if there is much that can be done. It would be a good thing if someone
that knows about dmg's could confirm or make our dmg do the right thing.

Robert