This evening I was greeted with a message from my trusty firefox installation that OSX 10.7 (Mountain Lion) is no longer supported and as such won’t receive any future updates. This contradicts the message over on the Firefox support site which states that support will continue to August 2016. I, like many people still run an old iMac. This machine is fast (faster than my brother in laws brand new iMac running OSX El Capitan) in real life even though the hardware is in no way a match.
I’ve tried all new versions of OSX on this machine and the last fast version to work is OSX Mountain Lion. I cannot replace a machine due to bloaty software and I in particular hate it when an OS gets bloaty. OS’s should be light & fast and allow each user to customise the system with software based on their needs. I don’t like all the new & faddy features to be baked into the OS. It’s harder to tweak and generally performs badly.
Chrome recently ended support for 10.7 so I switched to using Firefox solely on this machine. It would now appear that Mozilla have brought forward ending support for older versions of OSX and in turn ended support for people wanting to run older hardware.
I run older hardware because ethically I can’t justify replacing a perfectly serviceable machine. I don’t like planned or forced obsolescence. It feels like Apple are forcing people’s hands more and more with bloated ios updates and slow software. The hardware is still fine but the software cripples it.
I’m disappointed that Mozilla would also end support, especially as the open source community is made up of a lot of people with lower spec hardware, especially in the developing world. I refuse to update working hardware with software which will make it slow & useless. As an example, I currently have Dreamweaver, Firefox with 12 tabs, Mac Mail, iTunes, Illustrator, Photoshop & trillian running on my machine, with plenty of power to spare.
If you have hit this snag with Firefox you can opt for the Extended support release to buy some time, or start looking for another browser. Many open source projects are based on Firefox so it might be time to look into those. I use various firefox derivatives on my Trisquel Linux machine so I’ll start to investigate this further.
If anyone from Mozilla reads this, I would love it if you could extend support for older versions of OSX. I’m pretty sure you will get lots of requests for this & many more people will just run out of date & insecure browsers.
Really disappointing.
