I agree.
All signs indicate that Leopard will be a big release. Tiger has been
out the longest of any OS release (as Apple said when Tiger was put out
in April of 2005, the have slowed down the release cycle to make major
improvements). There are strong indications it will have a vastly
different visual look than Tiger. There are also probably numerous
places where things we currently do don't work correctly or the behavior
changes in the new OS. It's going to mean a bunch more work for us, and
it's work of a scope that is totally unknown, and much of it we may have
to do at the last second.
Another thing I would like to add is that Adium, an alternative IM
client for Mac OS X (that I work on), also has update statistics online
(http://adiumx.com/sparkle). According to those statistics, roughly 5-6%
of users are on 10.3.9. As of this writing, this is roughly the same
number of users as are left on 10.4.8 -- 10.4.9 came out a few weeks ago.
We have been through the decision to drop an OS release with Adium twice
now. There comes a point where the old OS is slowing you down
(development-wise) and preventing you from being competitive. That's
when you know you need to drop the OS. One good litmus? How many of your
community / developer types are using the OS. Right now, neither Josh
nor I have access to a 10.3 machine, despite us trying to load it on our
older PPC PowerBooks (they are too new to load the OS, and they are only
a couple years old). That isn't to say we couldn't *get* such a machine.
The point is that it's fairly old hardware, and those users are probably
not the types to try an alternative browser -- they'll probably just
stick with Safari.
To succeed on the Mac you need to be nimble and fashionable. Josh's work
with native form controls and all the Cocoa port work in general has
gone a long way, and I think with a nice theme and a few "hip" touches,
we can make a big splash with Firefox 3. Dropping 10.3 will help us be
more nimble.
-Colin
Unrelated to the decision to drop 10.3, I think this line of argument is
really really odd. Maybe that's because of all the people I know who
will buy a computer with some OS, keep using it (with that OS) for a
while (because upgrades tend to break things), but are happy to
experiment with non-OS software, including browsers. I'm having a hard
time reconciling the statistics being cited with my personal experience,
I guess. :(
-Boris
That sentence from Colin is the was the only part of the proposal and
accompanying emails I would take issue with, because it is completely
unsubstantiated. It could be correct, but who knows.
I do agree that we shouldn't spend inordinate developer resources on
5-6% of 5-6% of our users. With Linux, we need to be careful because of
the way it overlaps with our developer base (though it doesn't help to
muddle the two).
It's not pleasant to drop support for users that want to use Firefox 3
without paying Apple $100, but engineering is about all about
trade-offs. It doesn't seem like we have the resources to do it all, on
three versions of Mac OS X, and effectively compete with Safari, which
doesn't support older OS X versions for major upgrades.
- Rob, who snidely predicted this day when support for 10.2 was dropped,
and it was promised that 10.3 would be supported for Fx3, but now thinks
we should drop it like a rock
> Another thing I would like to add is that Adium, an alternative IM
> client for Mac OS X (that I work on), also has update statistics online
> (http://adiumx.com/sparkle). According to those statistics, roughly 5-6%
> of users are on 10.3.9. As of this writing, this is roughly the same
> number of users as are left on 10.4.8 -- 10.4.9 came out a few weeks ago.
It would be a good idea to see if we (Mozilla) have any stats for what
OS version our OS X users are running. I'm not sure if we collect that
level of detail from downloads/updates, though.
I'd be a little wary of how well the Adium stats correlate with the
actual installed base of OS X.
> Right now, neither Josh
> nor I have access to a 10.3 machine, despite us trying to load it on our
> older PPC PowerBooks (they are too new to load the OS, and they are only
> a couple years old). That isn't to say we couldn't *get* such a machine.
2 years is a long time in the software industry, but not so much for the
rest of the world. I would assume there is still lots of pre-2005
hardware and software being used in schools and homes... It seems
premature to dismiss it as outdated. [Given that upgrading to 10.4 isn't
free, I'd assume most of that hardware is still running the 10.3 it
shipped with.]
That said, if there are a lot of 10.3 users but they're not showing up
in our FF1/FF2 usage stats, then they're probably not relevant for FF3.
> To succeed on the Mac you need to be nimble and fashionable. Josh's work
> with native form controls and all the Cocoa port work in general has
> gone a long way, and I think with a nice theme and a few "hip" touches,
> we can make a big splash with Firefox 3. Dropping 10.3 will help us be
> more nimble.
I'm a little wary about this part as well... We're rapidly approaching
the first FF3 beta, which is supposed to be feature complete. Dropping
support for an OS is usually due to core, fundamental issues -- so it
seems rather late in the game to be talking about that.
I can see dropping 10.3 being a win for getting us there faster and
reducing testing requirements, though.
Justin
Justin Dolske wrote:
> Colin Barrett wrote:
>
>
>> Another thing I would like to add is that Adium, an alternative IM
>> client for Mac OS X (that I work on), also has update statistics online
>> (http://adiumx.com/sparkle). According to those statistics, roughly 5-6%
>> of users are on 10.3.9. As of this writing, this is roughly the same
>> number of users as are left on 10.4.8 -- 10.4.9 came out a few weeks ago.
>>
>
> It would be a good idea to see if we (Mozilla) have any stats for what
> OS version our OS X users are running. I'm not sure if we collect that
> level of detail from downloads/updates, though.
>
we should be able to dig this data out. there are some problems
currently with the loging and reporting system so it might be a few days.
generally the places that report Mac OS version info like
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
don't provide as much detail about OSX versions as they do for windows.
chris h.
Amen. That's exactly what I see when I look at what non-technical
non-early-adopter users (you recall, the folks we want to expand Firefox
market share with) are using.
> That said, if there are a lot of 10.3 users but they're not showing up
> in our FF1/FF2 usage stats, then they're probably not relevant for FF3.
If you assume that we're not trying to expand our market share in this
segment, then yes. Are we making that assumption?
(I'm not saying it's a bad assumption; I just want us to be conscious
that we're making it.)
> I can see dropping 10.3 being a win for getting us there faster and
> reducing testing requirements, though.
That's really what the whole thing is about -- lack of resources. I'm
really pretty unhappy with us dropping OS X 10.3 (because a number of
people I've only recently converted to Firefox are using it), but I can
see why we might have to do it given the date constraints on our Gecko
1.9 release. :(
-Boris
To clarify, that's with my evangelist hat on. As a sometimes Mac user
who doesn't use 10.3 himself and wants Firefox to work well on 10.4, I
like the idea, of course. :(
-Boris
Hooking up my question randomly here:
Given how old the hardware to run 10.3 had to be, how likely is it that
just paying a few 100 bucks is going to make that run 10.4 or .5?
Like, I only know about the hardware requirements evolution on windows
releases, and linux, to some extent. If OSX is only halfway close, we're
not asking users to upgrade their OS, but their hardware.
Axel
Let's talk about this with more detail, because I'm sympathetic to the
economic argument, especially given our scarce Mac hacking resources,
but I think we need to be more deliberate about it than just pursuit
of fashion and general nimbleness.
Which of the planned Gecko 1.9 features (blockers and otherwise) are
hard to do on 10.3? How much longer, roughly, would they take to do
in a 10.3-compatible way? Which parts of the feature would become
infeasible due to missing needed support in the OS? That information
will help us make a more widely-informed decision about the cost part
of the equation, I think.
Also: what is Apple's own support lifecycle for operating systems?
Will people still be getting security updates for 10.3 when Fx 3
ships, say in Q4 of this year?
Mike
As many of you know, I still run 10.3 on my laptop, mostly to catch PPC
bugs since everyone in the QA team runs Intel Mac with 10.4.x. I don't
buy the argument that if devs aren't using it, it isn't being used by
the community - in fact, Josh and others know I routinely raise issues
on 10.3 just so he doesn't have to run it (Do any of the Windows devs
run Win 98 or 2K - no, but we still support it). I would like to see
some other data to really get a sense of how many users are out there.
In the past I have been asking marketing to see if they can get us some
data on how many 10.3 users we actually have, but I have not gotten
anything. More data would be useful.
And as shaver says, more information about specific features that would
be hard to do on 10.3 (and are there any workarounds?) as well as
Apple's own support lifecycle would be helpful data to have.
I want to have a kick-ass Firefox 3 that makes Safari quake in its
boots, but I also don't want to dismiss the loyal Firefox users that
still may be using 10.3. We should definitely try to get some of the
data posters have asked about.
Not only schools and home, but esp. also businesses. Around here, for
example, as a business, you only can deduce taxes for a computer over
its expected lifetime, which is standardized to 4 years by law. Which
means, if a business upgrades its computers faster than every 4 years,
it might more or less lose parts of tax deductions - and 2 years are
only half of that time!
It's one thing to drop Win9x when Win2k debuted in 2000 and XP in 2001,
or to drop GTK1 when GTK2 was released in 2002, but asking users of
computers that are two years old (or only slightly older) to upgrade
their hardware seems a bit drastic. And I'm not sure how much of the
10.3 hardware can still run with Tiger (if Apple even still sells Tiger,
and not just Jaguar).
I guess the real question is how much overhead 10.3 support is actually.
Oh, and BTW, I think our main Mac developer (mostly doing UI stuff only
though) in the SeaMonkey project, Stefan Hermes (stefanh on IRC), still
has 10.3.9 available.
Robert Kaiser
For the record the original Mac Mini (1.42GHz G4) shipped with 10.3
(towards the end of 10.3's life). So there are still pretty modern PowerPC
based systems running 10.3. I'm almost positive G5's also shipped with
10.3. Odds are most of those are still in active use, and likely running
10.3.
> It's one thing to drop Win9x when Win2k debuted in 2000 and XP in 2001,
> or to drop GTK1 when GTK2 was released in 2002, but asking users of
> computers that are two years old (or only slightly older) to upgrade
> their hardware seems a bit drastic. And I'm not sure how much of the
> 10.3 hardware can still run with Tiger (if Apple even still sells Tiger,
> and not just Jaguar).
>
Agreed. Though one should differentiate between hardware and software.
Tiger (10.4) does support my B&W G3 (400MHz) from 1999. As a general rule
Apple supports hardware for at least 4 years. Here's a list of hardware
supported (officially) in 10.4:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.html
So upgrading hardware is a bit of a stretch. Anyone likely running Firefox
has the adequate hardware, they just need an OS update. For businesses,
this is more problematic because of multiple licenses, IT testing
compatibility, and OS rollouts aren't exactly easy... hence many stall as
long as possible.
That said, I personally think it's to early to drop 10.3 support. It
shipped to recently and on relatively modern hardware. Unless there's a
real lack of resources, or large overhead, I don't think it's a great
choice.
> I guess the real question is how much overhead 10.3 support is actually.
>
This is the BIG question.
--
Robert Accettura
rob...@accettura.com
> It's one thing to drop Win9x when Win2k debuted in 2000 and XP in
> 2001,
> or to drop GTK1 when GTK2 was released in 2002, but asking users of
> computers that are two years old (or only slightly older) to upgrade
> their hardware seems a bit drastic. And I'm not sure how much of the
> 10.3 hardware can still run with Tiger (if Apple even still sells
> Tiger,
> and not just Jaguar).
We're running around in circles here without any data, and it's not
really getting us anywhere. I could, for instance, argue from
anecdotal evidence that OSX users tend to refresh their OS far more
frequently than Windows users. Seems true, and feels true in my gut,
so by Colbert's Maxim, it must be right! :)
> I guess the real question is how much overhead 10.3 support is
> actually.
It's a question of balance, and the right questions have already been
asked:
- what is the overhead pain of 10.3 support (in terms of
development and QA)
- what is the expected lifecycle of 10.3 as stated by Apple?
- what is the expected uptake of 10.4 and when is it planned on
being released?
Right now it feels premature to me to ditch 10.3 support if our
release of Firefox 3 is planned within the same year as the 10.4
release, but let's work on getting some answers.
cheers,
mike
/Stefan
well, i think 10.4 has been out since the end of April 2005, and it's
actually 10.5 that's the upcoming release (now slated for november).
10.3 was released in October 2003.
my own anecdotal experience would suggest that folks who bought their
machines in the first half of 2005 even (which would include both my
mother & my mother-in-law) are still running 10.3, as it would have
required some proactive activity on their part to make it different.
(i'm such a lousy son & son-in-law that i haven't gone to upgrade them
yet. holding out for 10.5.)
while far from being actual data, i suggest that there are an awful
lot of folks who never shelled out for 10.4.
> Also: what is Apple's own support lifecycle for operating systems?
> Will people still be getting security updates for 10.3 when Fx 3
> ships, say in Q4 of this year?
I'm going to get even more aggressive on the subject:
Do we want to support a platform that the vendor has dropped security
updates for? I would assert that we do not. We've historically
dropped platforms as they hit end of life.
Do we want to support platforms that are about to be dropped shortly
before/after targeted release dates? I would assert that we don't
want to do this either (Firefox 3, if released in November, will be
supported until May 2009, so thinking only about ship date is a
little short-sighted).
From an IRC conversation with Josh, it seems fairly likely that
Apple will drop support for OS X 10.3 at the end of this year. Given
that Firefox 2 will continue to be supported until at least six
months after Firefox 3 ships, I think we will have the 10.3 holdouts
covered longer than Apple, and I think that's all we should
realistically plan to do.
-- Mike
I asked some friends who work for a Mac repair/reseller shop, and they
follow this sort of stuff rather closely. G4s will in general run
10.4.0 no problem, however Apple put in a hard shut-off even for some of
these in the 10.4.7-ish time frame, so OSes newer than that would not
work on some G4 hardware. The G3 will not run 10.4 at all without
modding, and since laptops ran about a year behind the desktops, some
people do still have G3 laptops that are functional machines for them.
Most people are on G4 or newer, though if they are still on a G4 or G3
with 10.3, chances are they aren't going to install a new OS: they're
waiting for a hardware upgrade to do so. Asking them to upgrade their
OS really is asking them to upgrade their hardware.
> well, i think 10.4 has been out since the end of April 2005, and it's
> actually 10.5 that's the upcoming release (now slated for november).
> 10.3 was released in October 2003.
Whoops - yeah, sorry, I got my numbers wrong there ;)
cheers,
mike
> Which of the planned Gecko 1.9 features (blockers and otherwise) are
> hard to do on 10.3? How much longer, roughly, would they take to do
> in a 10.3-compatible way? Which parts of the feature would become
> infeasible due to missing needed support in the OS? That information
> will help us make a more widely-informed decision about the cost part
> of the equation, I think.
At least most of that information is in my original proposal.
> Also: what is Apple's own support lifecycle for operating systems?
> Will people still be getting security updates for 10.3 when Fx 3
> ships, say in Q4 of this year?
That is definitely in my original proposal. Colin's post is a response
to that, please read the original.
We're making this assumption that Apple will drop support. It's a fair
assumption, to be sure, but it's an assumption nonetheless. Has Apple
officially said that they'll be dropping support?
-Sam
Out of curiosity, when did they drop 10.2 support? I just tried to find
that information and failed...
-Boris
Secondly, on the hardware/software upgrade issue, users don't *have*
to run Firefox 3 just like they don't *have* to run Mac OS X 10.4. If
you really want Firefox 3 for some compelling reason you can get it -
install 10.4. But there are other good browsers for 10.3, like Firefox
2 which we're all so fond of. Your mother in laws wouldn't be getting
left in the cold by us any more than they would be by Apple.
On May 23, 8:32 am, John <john.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> while far from being actual data, i suggest that there are an awful
> lot of folks who never shelled out for 10.4.
There's no question that there are people that are running 10.3 who
cannot or will not upgrade (heck, Camino's feedback list gets requests
for an OS 9 version every month or two), and I don't think there's any
question that we would like to continue to support them in an ideal
world. We've always made a real effort to support older OS versions
for Camino for as long as we reasonably can. All other things being
equal, we'd much rather have the option of supporting 10.3 for Camino
2.0 (when we will be picking up Gecko 1.9).
However, all other things aren't equal; Gecko 1.9 is a huge overhaul
of major parts of the tree. 10.3 has already caused problems in the
printing rewrite, in places touched by Cairo changes, and now in the
widget rewrite that will substantially improve the feel of 1.9 on OS
X. There are still substantial bugs that need to be resolved to make
1.9 solid, and I'm in agreement with Josh that given the limited
resources, spending time on the 10.3-only bugs that have resulted is
probably not realistic at this point.
If it were just a case of "let's drop 10.3 to make our lives a little
easier" I wouldn't be for it, but looking at the bug lists the
question I see is "is it worth sacrificing overall quality of 1.9 to
continue to support 10.3", and I think the answer there should be
"no", as unfortunate as that is.
-Stuart
On May 23, 8:32 am, John <john.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> while far from being actual data, i suggest that there are an awful
> lot of folks who never shelled out for 10.4.
There's no question that there are people that are running 10.3 who
yep, totally right. fair enough. but our basic plan is to do security
updates for fx2 for 6 months past the release of fx3, right? so that
puts us into middle of 2008, or about 3 years after 10.4 was released.
that's probably okay.
Sorry, yeah, I missed the summarization of the set of hard cases for
Panther. (I almost pasted your google doc here in my reply, so that
it would be in the thread for quoting and direct discussion, but that
seemed a little passive-aggressive!)
It sounds like the investment is pretty heavy, given our constraints
on the platform. I'd vote in support of dropping Panther support
passively for now: deblocking the Panther-only bugs, but not removing
existing Panther-around code, in case a motivated advocate arrives in
time to buy Panther one more release. (I would set "in time" as being
around b1, if I had to pick a time.)
I'm not sure that not being left in the cold by Apple is exactly the
benchmark to use -- they have a vested interest in having people pay
for new software and hardware, and we have a vested interest in having
as many users as feasible upgrade to our newer software -- but it's a
valuable data point to be sure, especially since it limits our ability
to support those users well. (We won't be able to effectively protect
them from security problems on their platform, f.e.)
Mike
Sorry about that, that was my fault entirely for replying with the wrong
header. Sorry if this caused any confusion! Please read Josh's original
proposal, here's the URL again:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddgz99zp_3f7p24k
It is well written and contains a lot I didn't mention in my reply.
> It sounds like the investment is pretty heavy, given our constraints
> on the platform. I'd vote in support of dropping Panther support
> passively for now: deblocking the Panther-only bugs, but not removing
> existing Panther-around code, in case a motivated advocate arrives in
> time to buy Panther one more release. (I would set "in time" as being
> around b1, if I had to pick a time.)
The investment is pretty heavy, and I would really like to point out
that a new OS is shipping a month or so before we release. We *are*
getting "feature complete betas," in a few weeks at WWDC, which will be
the first time we actually know everything that's going to be in Leopard
-- last year they told us our seeds were incomplete and there were still
"secret features."
Leopard compatibility, and devoting enough resources to it, is something
I'm personally very worried about. We really have no idea what is in
Leopard right now -- we'll have a better idea in a couple weeks, but
until the OS ships (a month before we do), we will be working against a
moving target. It is entirely possible that there will be a lot of work
to do at the very last second to get Firefox to work properly on 10.5.
Having to make sure we don't break 10.3 will, and has, cost us valuable
days and weeks.
If the 10.4 adoption rates are indicative, a year after the release ~50%
of Mac OS X users will be on the new OS. It's also highly likely that
will be quicker since there has not been an OS release in a while and
(from what I've heard), there will be significant UI changes, which
(assuming Apple creates something desirable) will drive sales further.
> I'm not sure that not being left in the cold by Apple is exactly the
> benchmark to use -- they have a vested interest in having people pay
> for new software and hardware, and we have a vested interest in having
> as many users as feasible upgrade to our newer software -- but it's a
> valuable data point to be sure, especially since it limits our ability
> to support those users well. (We won't be able to effectively protect
> them from security problems on their platform, f.e.)
Again, 10.3 users will still have Firefox 2, which we will be supporting
for a while.
This is, in part, a mention of resources. But as the platform evolves,
there are features that we want to deliver to our users (see Josh's
proposal for some more details) that we just cannot do on 10.3.
The engineering effort for 10.3 is large enough that it is becoming a
burden to development that affects the vast majority of our users. Josh
has some great examples in his original proposal, please read them.
-Colin
Sorry, typo:
s/Jaguar/Leopard/
It's easy to confuse all those cats. ;-)
Robert Kaiser
Exactly - just with s/10.4/10.5/ (as stated somewhere else in that
thread already - just not threaded correctly in the ng)
Robert Kaiser
Umm, so we should drop Win2k and XP SP1 as well? I heard there may no
security updates for those any more - or did I get that incorrectly?
And why does FF2 even support any Win9x version when security support
has been dropped way before FF2 shipped?
I'm not sure this is the way to go, even though I see the reasoning
behind it.
Robert Kaiser
Realistically, we expect Firefox 3 to provide a better user experience
than Firefox 2, right? And we want our users to have this better
experience?
And as time goes on and web sites make more use of the Firefox 3 core
features, the disparity will grow. So the users who can't upgrade and
keep getting told by web sites that their browser sucks (in possibly mor
polite terms) will feel more and more unhappy. Which is bad, given the
way that our viral marketing thing works.
With any luck, the time it will take for web sites to really start
discriminating against Firefox 2 will be large enough that it won't
matter. Our best advertising last I checked is really happy mother in
laws telling all their friends about this thing their daughter in law
installed for them. ;)
> Your mother in laws wouldn't be getting left in the cold by us any
> more than they would be by Apple.
That's a pretty low bar, really. Apple has strong incentives to leave
people in the cold so they have to upgrade.
-Boris
Chris Hofmann wrote:
> Justin Dolske wrote:
>
>> Colin Barrett wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Another thing I would like to add is that Adium, an alternative IM
>>> client for Mac OS X (that I work on), also has update statistics online
>>> (http://adiumx.com/sparkle). According to those statistics, roughly 5-6%
>>> of users are on 10.3.9. As of this writing, this is roughly the same
>>> number of users as are left on 10.4.8 -- 10.4.9 came out a few weeks ago.
>>>
>>>
>> It would be a good idea to see if we (Mozilla) have any stats for what
>> OS version our OS X users are running. I'm not sure if we collect that
>> level of detail from downloads/updates, though.
>>
>>
> we should be able to dig this data out. there are some problems
> currently with the loging and reporting system so it might be a few days.
>
> generally the places that report Mac OS version info like
> http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
> don't provide as much detail about OSX versions as they do for windows.
>
>
Apache logs don't seem to be much help in analyzing mac version info.
Here is about all we can get out of the user agent
For mozilla.org traffic yeseterday Mac traffic made up about 8% or
186000 page views. Those page views were distributed among the following
48% PPC Mac OS X Mach-O
32% Intel Mac OS X
12% PPC Mac OS X
6% PPC
Just looking at Safari page views might help. Can these webkit version
numbers be roughly associated with OS releases? And can that iphone
tester that is hitting mozilla.org please identify who you are? ;-)
17749 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419
9790 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419
3652 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
2211 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
1012 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
933 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
872 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9
745 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/419
632 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.8.5
575 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.8
534 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418
479 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9
450 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/419
362 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418
334 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412
324 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/419
314 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.8
309 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/417.9
306 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; ja-jp) AppleWebKit/419
278 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/416.11
268 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.1
217 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; ja-jp) AppleWebKit/419
205 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.6
204 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.8
177 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/103u
168 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/420+
166 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/417.9
161 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/419
157 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.2
106 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.6
93 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85
76 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/412.7
75 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.4
72 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/418.9
72 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/418.8
69 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/419
67 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/312.8
67 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/522+
63 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5
60 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
59 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/419
59 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; zh-cn) AppleWebKit/419
59 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/124
58 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
56 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/522+
54 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/419
52 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419.3
50 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.7
49 SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413
46 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; fr) AppleWebKit/419
46 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/85.8.5
46 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; fr) AppleWebKit/419
45 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7
44 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/312.1
44 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/106.2
43 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/103u
41 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/418.9
41 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; af-za) AppleWebKit/419
39 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
37 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.4
37 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/418.9
35 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
34 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.6.2
34 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419.2
33 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X;) AppleWebKit/412.7
33 iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+
32 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/312.8.1
32 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; es) AppleWebKit/418.9
32 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5
32 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; bg-bg) AppleWebKit/312.1
30 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/418.9
30 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/312.1
30 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; ko-kr) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
29 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/412.6
29 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/416.11
29 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/416.12
29 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.5
29 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; zh-tw) AppleWebKit/418.9.1
28 Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/312.5
28 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/419
28 Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/419
> chris h.
> _______________________________________________
> dev-planning mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-planning
>
This is true. Just be aware there are different levels of "support" at
work here.
One level of support is "we will be doing new things with this" and "we
will help you will problems with this" and another is "we will give you
(only) what we are legally required to give you".
The security updates are from the latter.
- ray
Here is one indicator.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75421
The last software update for 10.2 was released December 2, 2004.
If you are looking for Apple to put "we do not support <whatever>" on a
web page, I do not think they ever will. If it is negative, they just do
not say the words. If the answer is positive, they say something.
More information (and assorted rants) on Apple's legal viewpoints and
practices available upon request.
- ray
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300770 is Jan 25, 2005
(according to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798) and
includes 10.2.8 updates, no?
> If you are looking for Apple to put "we do not support <whatever>" on a
> web page, I do not think they ever will.
I see. That makes it really hard to tell whether they've dropped
support, huh?
-Boris
Extrapolating:
10.5 expected: ~NOV 2007 (hmm, ~Ff3 expected, too)
10.3 EOL: ~JUN 2008 (hmm, ~Ff2 EOL, too)
I still run OSX 10.3.9 on a Blue G3.
I use SeaMonkey (1.1.2.RC.09-May-2007)
and sometimes Ff (2.0.0.4.RC.3)
and maybe Camino (1.5.RC.2).
Given the above OSX 10.x release/EOL realities,
and the quality of the latest Gecko 1.8.1 based RCs,
I would be OK with Ff3 EOLing/discontinuing
10.3 support in sync with Apple.
Thank you,
Eddie
They can: 4xx is 10.4, 1xx-3xx is 10.3, so about 15% of that listing
is 10.3.
We made similar assumptions about Tiger about 2yrs ago at AOL, thinking "oh,
Panther (10.3) was such a lame upgrade, most people skipped it and will
flock to Tiger in droves. Well, years later, we still have the same 50%
adoption after 1yr curve. I don't think we should assume that it'll be any
different here, though we'd love to think so.
One other thing that hasn't really been mentioned here is that our products
are an alternative to Safari. We fill a gap (web compatibility, extensions,
"not safari", works on older OS versions) and cutting out the users that
want that choice on older OS's seems to go against our core user base. Most
people will just use Safari, the others choose us for a reason, let's not
give them less reason. In the past for Camino, we got sizable kudos for
continuing to work on older OS's when Apple had abandoned them. Maybe it was
only a few users, but the good-will spreads to everyone involved.
-Pink
Even 50% adoption 1 year out is still very significant, and means that
10.5 will very very quickly eclipse 10.3 in marketshare.
> One other thing that hasn't really been mentioned here is that our products
> are an alternative to Safari. We fill a gap (web compatibility, extensions,
> "not safari", works on older OS versions) and cutting out the users that
> want that choice on older OS's seems to go against our core user base. Most
> people will just use Safari, the others choose us for a reason, let's not
> give them less reason. In the past for Camino, we got sizable kudos for
> continuing to work on older OS's when Apple had abandoned them. Maybe it
> was
> only a few users, but the good-will spreads to everyone involved.
This is, as Josh said, a question of resources. We have limited set of
people to do the work that needs to get done, and we need to make some
choices about what's going to get done.
Should we support 10.3 users at the exclusion of better support for
users of 10.4 and 10.5? That is the question at hand. (If I at all
suggested something else, I apologize).
-Colin
This is sort of the point I was trying to make. We should realize that
the impact of dropping users is a lot bigger than just the users dropped.
But I still don't have a way for us to do 1.9 in the time limit we have
set ourselves with the current resources, with decent quality, with 10.3
support. :(
-Boris
A few things I want to know about that date:
1) How do we know that's when 10.2 went EOL?
2) Do the users know that?
3) Will 10.3 users know that they are EOL, and that's why we're
dropping them?
I feel that the perception here is important, and we don't want the
perception to be "Firefox dropped us" as much as "Apple dropped us", I
would think...
-Boris
This comment does not address the trade-off that is being presented.
Everyone agrees that dropping support for 10.3 could result in upset
users. However, we need to pick between three choices. Here's a survey:
[1] Ship a high-quality product for 10.4 and 10.5
[2] Ship a lower-quality product for 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5
[3] ___________________ will provide the resources to fix Panther
bugs so that we can ship a high-quality product on 10.3, 10.4,
and 10.5
Does anyone believe this is a false choice? I want to pick door #1.
- Rob
I believe that is when the update of any kind shipped for 10.2
> 2) Do the users know that?
Following Ray's observation, I would say generally no. I would assert
that in fact believe they are supported far shorter than Apple actually
supports them -- I would guess that the average user would tend to think
that Apple only supports the current release of Mac OS X. I only have
anecdotal evidence to support that claim, but I think it's pretty
reasonable.
> 3) Will 10.3 users know that they are EOL, and that's why we're
> dropping them?
Apple generally won't notify them that they are no longer supported, but
the new version of the OS and the lack of anything appearing in Software
Update might give them the impression that Apple has moved on.
> I feel that the perception here is important, and we don't want the
> perception to be "Firefox dropped us" as much as "Apple dropped us", I
> would think...
Ideally, we would love to support these users as much as we could, but
as Rob Sayre pointed out, we do not have the engineering resources to do so.
-Colin
As presented, yes. I believe more accurate choices would be:
[1] Ship a high-quality product for 10.4 and 10.5 in Nov 2007.
[2] Ship a lower-quality product than in [1] for 10.3, 10.4,
and 10.5 in Nov 2007.
[3] Shop a ? quality product for 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 in ?.
[4] ___________________ will provide the resources to fix Panther
bugs so that we can ship a high-quality product on 10.3, 10.4,
and 10.5 in Nov 2007.
I'd be interested in the values of the two question marks in choice 3.
If we decide we want to support 10.3 in 1.9 no matter what, how much of
a schedule slip does that represent? A month? A year?
If there is a chance that it's not that big a projected slip, it might
be worth focusing on the 10.4/10.5 blockers now, leave the existing 10.3
code, and then work on 10.3 issues if (or rather when) the 1.9 schedule
slips due to some other part of the code. If we get 10.3 into good
shape before ship, we ship it. If we don't, we can have a discussion
about how the not-quite-perfect Firefox 3 on 10.3 compares to Firefox 2
on 10.3 at that point.
Note that I'm not suggesting we slip for 10.3 per se, just that we take
advantage of slips, if they happen, to work on 10.3 issues. That does
mean having 10.4/10.5 stuff wrapped up on time, though.
-Boris
OK, I can accept those choices. Choice #3 is not appealing to me,
because the more we slip, the less relevant 10.3 is, and I am assuming
that small amounts of slippage will not be a big enough window to fix 10.3.
- Rob
Well, actually, from where we stand at the moment, it's hard to beleive
we could get a final of Gecko 1.9 stabilized until November or even in
2007. But then, we still have 6 months to go, who knows what this
awesome community can achieve in that time...
Robert Kaiser
Right. Again, I'm not saying we should slip for 10.3. I'm saying we
shouldn't go out of our way to break 10.3 and see what things look like
in terms of Mac resources and priorities when we slip.
-Boris
That is, continue supporting legacy functionality
from Ff2-OSX10.3,
plus whatever new features from Ff3-OSX10.4/10.5
that can be easily supported in Ff3-OSX10.3
given developer availability and technical feasibility?
Eddie