Are they gambling alienating users for an easy code base?
I suppose it's fair enough that the FF team should be considering ditching support for Tiger given that ditching support for 9x and Xp has also been mooted - which generally prompted a coffee-spewing of "where's the need to ditch my Xp what doesn't it do that Vista does apart from pretty graphics" a week or so ago on these same pages from the Microsoft Fanbois.
Note I haven't mentioned anything about soft drinks, just altered the company name on the standard epithet given to users of Apple products on this thread. It's only a computer, get over it.
I have a Tiger-based intel iMac in front of me. I use it for Adobe CS3. It does integration and managing system resources much better than any Windows system. I can do more CS3 work with it in less time, more easily. There are other jobs I would rather have my Windows machine for. Horses for courses.
Poking around at various distros of Linux, it seems that platform support out of the box actually almost exists, now. But as soon as you want software you are pointed at WiNE or maybe Parallels, one of which involves much fiddling and no guarantee of success and the other isn't really much different from dual-booting. Current distros seem to satisfy the requirement for easy installs, but the software base really needs to exist, and it needs to be the commercial apps or something so similar that the authors would be sued out of existence.
Cutting to the chase; this isn't about whether it's reasonable dropping support for an older os, it's about whether doing so will hand the market share FF has built up to someone else. I can only think of one player with a browser in wide usage that has a long history of continuing to support old systems an caving in and going on a bit longer when the users complain. But they last made a browser for Apple products in about 2002. Will dropping a system only one major out of date scare users away?
Some posters here also seem to be unaware that there is a very good reason that not all Macs are running 10.5 already - and no it isn't to save a £100 or so ('Shafting users'). Apple have built the 10.5 installer to reject machines under 867MHz, although you can trick it on if you want - you just have an unsupported system and possibly partial functionality. This means that officially no G3's and only about half of G4's can have 10.5, although they may continue to be useful with whatever OS is loaded. Maybe Apple do shaft users by not supporting all legacy hardware, but you can't support it all for ever or you end up with the compatibility problems Microsoft have brought upon themselves.
As to 'since OsX is so *nix like why no ports', this question should really be asked of the app developers. If Adobe brought out their stuff on *nix then suddenly an awful lot of G4 PowerMacs would be getting dusted off. On the other hand, why no kernel support for Apple APIs and Universal Binaries in Ubuntu?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
