Mac users still using OS X 10.5 Leopard may not be able to use newer versions of Firefox much longer. Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas has proposed dropping support for Leopard from June 2012 onwards.
Aas quotes figures that show only 6.6% of Firefox users are on Macs and estimates that around 20% of these are using Leopard. He adds that this figure is only likely to go down when the next final version of Firefox is released:
Mac OS X 10.5 users have been declining by 1-2% per month (as a share of our total Mac OS X users). This means that when Firefox 13 ships, Mac OS X 10.5 users will likely make up about 13% of Mac OS X users across all versions of Firefox. This number should be around 9% for users of the most recent version of Firefox.
It’s unlikely that Leopard users will lose sleep over this news though. Many Firefox users have preferred to stick to Firefox 3 anyway due to various bugs, memory hogging issues and add-on in compatibility problems since Mozilla moved to a Google Chrome-like faster release cycle. The problem with this though is that older versions of Firefox no longer receive security updates and fixes.
If you are a Leopard user and rely on Firefox it looks like you’ve got two options. Either stick with any Firefox version that’s released up until June 2012 or take a look at Google Chrome, Safari or Opera which all plan to keep supporting OS 10.5. Also, check-out our Firefox to Chrome switchers guide if you’re considering Google’s browser as an option.
