We’ve known for a while now that Mozilla plans on phasing out support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard — the last release from Apple that runs on PowerPC hardware. We now know that Firefox 16, to be released on the 9th of October, will be the last version with Leopard support. Firefox 17, the first Leopard-free version, will ship on November 20th.
Gregg Keizer’s article on Macworld points out that Leopard users are a tiny portion of Firefox’s user base. Only 4.6 percent are Mac users, and of that small percentage, only 17 percent were still using Leopard last June. Not only has Apple stopped supporting Leopard, but so have most developers of software still being actively developed.
For compatibility purposes, there are still some of us that keep an old machine running a historic operating system. It won’t last forever, but often there aren’t many better solutions available. It’s looking like the time to abandon that legacy 10.5 machine is coming sooner rather than later. Keep in mind, Leopard shipped in October of 2007, and hasn’t seen an update from Apple since November of last year.
Are you still running Leopard on one of your machines? If so, why keep it around?
Source: Macworld
Image Credit: Dluogs
