Josh Aas of the Mozilla development planning team recently posted a note stating that they want to make a final decision on the removal of Tiger code in FireFox. If they proceed as planned, then Firefox 3.6 will be the last version supported on Tiger.

Mr. Aas noted that 59 percent of Firefox 3.6 users are using Snow Leopard, 29 percent are using Leopard and only 12 percent are using Tiger.

In his note, he wrote: "Mac OS X 10.4 was released in April of 2005 and a lot has changed since then. We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X and 10.4 support has been a hindrance. Where we can work around supporting 10.4, doing so consumes valuable time and effort. Neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this."

He added: "Adding 10.4 support back to mozilla-central would mean switching back to ATSUI from Core Text, switching back to gcc-4.0 from gcc-4.2, and doing a bit of porting work for code that has been added to the tree since we dropped support for 10.4. Other areas where 10.4 support consumes our time, makes our code more complex or error-prone, and/or limits our capabilities include complex text input (IME), out-of-process plugins, printing, native menus, and Core Animation. Furthermore, Apple's upcoming JavaPlugin2 will not support Mac OS X 10.4."

Those who have strong objections to the plan should contact the Mozilla Development team at the above link. The Google Group has a healthy discussion of the issues in the responses.