The last time Apple patched bugs in 10.5 was in November 2011 and its most recent security update in May of this year, disabled older copies of Flash Player to stymie Flashback rather than fix anymore specific security flaws.Ī financial reason to drop 10.5 support is that the cost of keeping 10.5 supported for additional releases is simply too high for the benefit received. The biggest reason for Google and Mozilla to dump Mac OS X 10.5 support was that Apple has already retired support for Mac OS X 10.5. However, discussions with engineers, managers and contributors restarted in late June of this year, leading up to the final decision to stop supporting Mac OS X 10.5 when Firefox 17 made its way to mozilla-nightly. Mozilla first talked about ditching 10.5 support in early December 2011, it decided then to maintain support for that OS months longer. When Google Chrome 22 gets released Google Chrome on 10.5 will no longer be auto-updated and in addition to this, once Chrome 21 reaches EOL, users will never again be able to install Google Chrome 21 on any Mac running 10.5. Google already released its last browser for Mac OS 10.5, Chrome 21 on 31 July 2012.

Mozilla is following Google's lead to permanently drop Mac OS 10.5 support. Overall, only 4.6% of Firefox 13's users were running it on a Mac. At last check in a 21 June 2012 report, 17% of Firefox 13's users on Mac were running 10.5 with a larger number of users on either 10.6 or 10.7. Since the release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in June 2009, Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) in July 2011 and Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) almost a month ago, 10.5's importance has been gradually diminishing by 1% per month as a share of the total Mac OS users. After that, updates to Firefox and other Mozilla-based products on Mac OS 10.5 will stop. The builds will fail to run on anything less than Mac OS X 10.6.'įirefox 15 will be released in less than one week from today and Firefox 16 which will be released on 9 October 2012 and will only be supported until 20 November 2012. Mozilla's Macintosh platform engineer, Josh Aas said in bug report #772735 on Bugzilla, 'We are not planning to support Mac OS X 10.5 with Firefox 17. Mozilla will permanently drop Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) support when Mozilla releases Firefox 17 on 20 November 2012.

For more information regarding the end of Firefox support for Mac OS X 10.5, read these articles:

Firefox for mac os x 10.5