I don't think it's entirely unfair -- both sets of numbers have their place. OS X is an important platform, but it's also true that these older OS X releases represent a tiny portion of our overall userbase.
For a few more data points... Back in Firefox 16 when we dropped 10.5 -- another long-lived and popular release -- those users represented 17% of our OS X users (or 0.78% of overall userbase). Dropping 10.6 - 10.8 is about 1.5x the impact (percentage wise), and so we should think carefully about that, but it's not significantly out of character for what we've done before. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/aT7hy7YDdqA/j2O0bUnuYMEJ When we dropped 10.4 (early in the Firefox 4.0 cycle, about a year before release), it represented 25% of 3.5 users and 17% of 3.6 users. (I don't see a overall userbase number in the thread.) https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.planning/fTpkdYa6uZM/9aPn58hvVa8J And waaaay back when we dropped 10.3 (for FF3.0), it represented 16.5% of OS X users, 0.69% of total user base. http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/msg/c19ecb46e27dbf91 http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/msg/4bd908b72a5e0759 One thing all of these threads show is that there's a lot of noise and handwringing and doomsayers when we broach the topic of dropping support for an OS X release. :) Justin On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 01:03:43PM -0500, Benjamin Smedberg wrote: > > This is notice of an intent to deprecate support within Firefox for the > > following old versions of MacOS: 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 > > > > The motivation for this change is that we have continued failures that > are > > specific to these old operating systems and don't have the resources on > > engineering teams to prioritize these bugs. Especially with the > deployment > > of e10s we're seeing intermittent and permanently failures on MacOS 10.6 > > that we are not seeing elsewhere. We get very little testing of old MacOS > > versions from our prerelease testers and cannot dedicate much paid staff > > testing support to these platforms. We also have an increasingly fragile > set > > of old hardware that supports automated tests on 10.6 and do not intend > to > > replace this. > > > > This will affect approximately 1.2% of our current release population. > Here > > are the specific breakdowns by OS version: > > > > 10.6 > > 0.66% > > 10.7 > > 0.38% > > 10.8 > > 0.18% > > It's unfair to mention those populations by percentage of the global > Firefox population. What are those percentages relative to the number of > OSX users? ISTR 10.6 represented something like 25% of the OSX users, > which is a totally different story (but maybe I'm mixing things with > Windows XP). > > Mike > _______________________________________________ > firefox-dev mailing list > firefox-...@mozilla.org > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
