Firefox 17 will 'abandon' the OS X Leopard operating system

As planned, after the release of Firefox 16 in October 2012, Mozilla will end up upgrading Firefox for OS X 10.5 'Leopard' operating system.

"We have no plans to support Mac OS X 10.5 with Firefox 17," said Josh Aas of the Firefox development team in a statement last month on the Bugzilla page. "Firefox 17 will run on operating systems from Mac OS X 10.6 or later".

OS X 10.6 ' Snow Leopard ' is the next version of Leopard, released in October 2007.

Photo: NewsFlaps.com

According to Mozilla's release, Firefox 16 will be released on October 9, 2012. Firefox 17 - the first version not available to Leopard users - is expected to be released on November 20, 2012.

Earlier, Google also stopped supporting Leopard. Google released Chrome 21, their last browser supported OS X 10.5, on July 31, 2012.

According to Mozilla, the importance of Leopard is decreasing. " Mac OS X 10.5 users decrease by 1% each month on the total market share of Firefox users on Mac OS X" , said Aas. "Combined with the impact of OS X 10.8 operating system release" Mountain Lion ', maybe the number of Mac OS X 10.5 users will only account for about 10% of Mac OS X users when Firefox 17 launches.

As of June 21, 2012, 17% of Firefox 13 users on Macs are running Leopard, 35% are running Snow Leopard and 48% are running Lion, Aas said. The number of Firefox 13 users on Mac accounts for only 4.6% of all users of this browser version.

Another reason Mozilla stopped supporting Leopard was that Apple also ended up supporting the operating system. The last time Apple patched in Leopard was November 2011, and the most recent security update was in May 2012.

And finally, because " Apple released a new version for their operating system relatively quickly, and each new version has many significant changes that we have to adapt," Aas said. "This requires resources, and with limited resources, we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about where to invest."