4/3/2023 0 Comments Tenfourfox requirements![]() ![]() If Electrolysis won’t function on Intel Macs using OS X 10.6, I really see no point to developing TenSixFox as a separate project. It’s going to remain in use for years to come, just as some Windows users are still on XP. Snow Leopard is a legacy version of OS X. ![]() Going forward, Snow Leopard users can stick with the official Firefox 45 ESR or run TenFourFox via Rosetta – using the same core available in a native Intel Mac build, although TenFourFox may be more stable on OS X 10.6. TenFourFox will use Firefox 45 as its core going forward, adding what features it can from future releases but ignoring Electrolysis because it cannot be supported by OS X 10.4 Tiger. TenFourFox will also stop development after Firefox 45 because Firefox 46 and beyond will include Electrolysis (e10s) to provide faster, more secure access to content. There’s one problem there: Firefox is dropping OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 with Extended Support Release 45, which will give us about one more year of support. ![]() Perhaps the best reason against compiling a version of Firefox for OS X 10.6 users is that Snow Leopard includes Apple’s Rosetta software, which translates PowerPC code to Intel code on the fly, allowing us to run PowerPC-only software on Intel Macs running OS X 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, and 10.6 Snow Leopard. Can’t Snow Leopard Already Run TenFourFox? Snow Leopard users are a solid audience, and at this point most Lion users are on Macs that don’t support anything newer. Lion is pretty steady, and Mountain Lion is shrinking away as more users upgrade to a more recent version of OS X. In our community, the percentage of Snow Leopard users has risen slightly over the past two months. ![]() (Less than 3% of Intel Mac users visiting are using OS X 10.4 or 10.5.) We obviously represent a very different demographic than users of currently supported versions of Firefox. But Wait a MinuteĪmong Low End Mac users on OS X 10.6 and higher, our February site logs show 10.6 at 11.7%, 10.7 at 6.4%, and 10.8 at 3.1%, so for us, that’s over 21% vs. And the 15% on Mountain Lion can migrate to a currently supported version of OS X for free. Of the three versions of OS X being deprecated, 10.6 Snow Leopard represents about 55% of those Firefox users. Apple no longer provides any support for these versions of OS X.All OS X 10.8 users can upgrade to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, 10.10 Yosemite, and 10.11 El Capitan for free.Current versions of Xcode development software (and possibly other development tools as well) no longer support OS X versions prior to 10.9 Mavericks.With relatively few Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion users (1.2% of all Mac users), Mozilla cannot justify investing resources in increasingly outdated versions of the Mac OS.“…we’re seeing intermittent and permanently failures on MacOS 10.6 that we are not seeing elsewhere.” Firefox is already having problems on OS X 10.6.There are several factors to take into consideration that mitigate against Mozilla continuing development for Firefox for these versions of OS X: With Firefox preparing to leave behind OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.7 Lion, and 10.8 Mountain Lion after Firefox 45 ESR* is replaced by the next Extended Support Release, I suggested it might be time for the Mac community to develop a branch of Mozilla that continues to support Snow Leopard. ![]()
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