Our Universal Mac builds are a frequent headache for build system work, being a special snowflake in many ways. They also use twice as much machine time as other builds, since they do a separate build for each architecture. I think it's time to make a plan to retire them and ship single-architecture 64-bit only builds.
As far as I know, there are two main blockers here: 1) Users with 32-bit Apple hardware that can't install a 64-bit OS will become unsupported. I don't have data on how many users this is, but I suspect we can determine this from Telemetry. It's my understanding that the last 32-bit only Apple hardware that was sold was in late 2006, so it's nearly 9 years old at this point. 2) Currently watching Netflix in Firefox on OS X requires the Silverlight plugin, which is 32-bit only, so we need to ship a universal build for this to work. I believe that we are planning to ship an EME CDM that will work with Netflix in the near future, so this should make this a non-issue. For comparison, Chrome dropped support for 32-bit OS X late last year in Chrome 39[1]. If we have a plan to support Netflix without Silverlight, and we are OK with unsupporting however many users are stuck on 32-bit only Apple hardware, I think we should make a plan to switch our official builds to 64-bit only. Does anyone have any concerns I've missed? -Ted 1. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2849225/chrome-for-os-x-turns-64-bit-forsakes-early-intel-macs.html _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
