Mozilla denies plans to ditch Firefox support for Mac OS X Leopard

Browser maker Mozilla has been quick to deny claims that it is preparing to ditch Firefox support for Mac OSX 10.5, otherwise known as Leopard.

V3 wrote last Thursday that Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas had proposed the changes on a Mozilla.dev discussion forum, adding that Firefox support for Leopard should end with the introduction of Firefox 13, due "on or near" 5 June 2012.

However, in a brief statement sent to V3 today, Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering, Johnathan Nightingale, claimed that talk of ditching Leopard support was just that and is not a final decision.

"As part of our open development process we discuss proposals in the open. There are no current plans to EOL Firefox on Mac OS X 10.5," he said.

However, Aas' reasons for wanting to end support for OS X 10.5 are fairly compelling.

Leopard has been succeeded by just two other versions, Lion and Snow Leopard, but is around four years old and apparently consumes a "non-trivial portion" of Mozilla's Mac development resources.

"Furthermore, there are already some significant ways in which Firefox on Mac OS X 10.5 has fallen behind Firefox on newer versions of Mac OS X," Aas argued on the original developer forum thread.

"Accelerated compositing and WebGL are not available on Mac OS X 10.5. Users cannot run plug-ins out-of-process on Mac OS X 10.5."

He added that Apple itself has stopped supporting Leopard by no longer shipping security or Safari updates.

Firefox has not had the best of times recently, as Google's Chrome leaped above the Mozilla browser for the first time, according to November figures from research firm StatCounter.