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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

So you don't have to look it up like I did, 10.5 Leopard came out five years ago. I'm sure they know the usage numbers better than me, but the number of people who haven't upgraded in five years and who use an alternate browser has to be quite small.

And FWIW, Apple requires 10.7.4 for Safari.

Update: in a by no means statistically valid way, I pulled the stats from Google Analytics for my website over the last 30 days... 186,883 Mac visits (if it shows where things are going, iOS had 814,201 visits!), with 33,934 using Intel 10.5.X. This is higher than I was predicting (18.16% of total Mac visits). It's actually about 3 times higher than the number of people on 10.8. However, most of these people are using Safari and just 2,040 were Chrome users( 1.09% of total Mac visits).

If anyone with a more Mac heavy site has numbers, I'd be curious.

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I would be very curious as to exactly what OS features are really required to display a web page, that are apparently missing in 10.5 which is a perfectly modern operating system. And if there is such a thing, why the browser doesn't degrade gracefully (i.e. if it's some hardware acceleration API, doing the same thing in software slowly, a la OpenGL). It smells a lot like "encouraging" upgrades for the sake of it, which really means, to sell new hardware while the old hardware is still perfectly fine for 99.999% of what even power users do.

It doesn't have to be features that are required. Another OS version just requires more development time and more testing resources. There are lots of little things that you discover break if you develop on the latest OS, and then test on the older one (or vice versa; neither forwards nor backwards compatibility are perfect). At this point, 10.8 is out, so developing on 10.5 means you need to test on 4 different versions, each with their own quirks, just for Mac OS X.

Obviously there are no features that are required to display a web page that are missing on 10.5. Browsers were developed and ran perfectly fine on there. Some newer features might not work, or some newer optimizations. But remember, keeping around all the old code paths, that check for particular features, can lead to more development cost, more testing cost, more bugs, more security vulnerabilities.

Another example is security features. Snow Leopard (10.6) introduced some new security features, like stack protection and more sandboxing. Chrome is heavily focused on security, and they may not be able to provide the full isolation that they would like on 10.5.

I develop software that should by all rights work fine on 10.5. And nothing that we do can't be made to worth there. But it takes more work; I develop on 10.7, we test heavily on 10.6 and 10.8, and when we go to test on 10.5, we find things that are broken not because they're impossible, but just because some interface is different so we need to add a new code path to handle that case. All that extra testing and development is expensive, and there are increasingly few people still on 10.5, so the benefit is continually shrinking.

Right, but this is Apple's own product. They had to be already set up for testing on 10.5, and made a conscious decision to stop.

Wait, what? Chrome is not Apple's product. It's Google's.

And being already set up for testing does not make it free. Hardware dies, and you have to replace it. More and more developers move on to newer OSs, and it becomes harder for them to get all of their development environment working in the older OS to find and fix bugs.

Have you ever tried developing a product with backwards compatibility across 4 different OS releases? It is by no means easy, it limits what you can do, and it makes your software more complicated and bug prone.

Don't think of it as having to make a conscious decision to stop. It's more that you have to make a conscious effort, that gets greater as time goes on, to continue supporting the older release. More libraries that you use start dropping compatibility. More new features have to be ifdef'd out, leading to divergence in what your software supports on different systems. More effort has to be put into keeping the build system running. And more manual testing needs to be done.

What, exactly, is Apple to test? They're not shipping updates to 10.5, and Chrome is Google's product to test.

He explained it all in his comment.

(1) Being "already set up for testing" for an older OS version

and

(2) continuing to use the testing setup for that version in addition to ever increasing new test setups (for 10.6, 10.7. 10.8 etc) and codepaths

is not the same thing.

As you get newer OSs to support, maintaining older testing setups means more work, and more IFDEFS and such in the code.

I am not too bothered about them needing to do more work given that they produce a premium product, in fact putting more care in is their entire shtick! Car makers don't stop making spare parts a couple of years after a new model comes out. If they did no one would buy them.

>I am not too bothered about them needing to do more work given that they produce a premium product, in fact putting more care in is their entire shtick!

Putting more care in the LATEST offering. Putting more care in older versions if a loosing proposition.

And it's not just a "throw more people / money at it" problem. After some point the complexity of legacy support grows exponentially and the code suffers (or gets hold back).

>Car makers don't stop making spare parts a couple of years after a new model comes out. If they did no one would buy them.

5 years in computing is like 20 car years...

Google doesn't have an incentive for you to buy a new Mac, I seriously doubt they have that as a motive. At its most basic, it's tedious to go back and check on 10.5 for every release. If you're not able to support new features on the old OS, there's a lot more testing involved. They likely ran the numbers and said it wasn't worth it.

Here's a discussion from some FireFox developers about it. Sounds like they want to drop support for 10.5 as well:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mozilla....

The stats across a number of large Australia media entertainment sites I was involved with earlier this year were between 1.5% to 2.0% mac chrome users from january to march.

Uniques over this period were between 2-3 million.

I'm part of that small percentage although I'm trying to change to Safari!

Mac Chrome users as a percentage of total users or as a percentage of Mac users? My traffic breaks down as Macs making up 7.46% total visits and Chrome is used by 7.91% of those Mac users (the percentages are oddly close, but unrelated). Safari makes up the vast majority of Mac browser share, 76.30% for me.

But it's an even smaller slice when looking at who's using 10.5. Fraction of a fraction of a fraction of users (Mac > Chrome > 10.5).

Percentage of total users which are using mac with chrome across the entire percentage of total users.

The total percentage of Mac+iOS across the total uniques was quite high at around 25% and like your figures, a huge portion of this was from iOS users, not Mac users.

Never thought to do a run down by OSX version but I agree that the numbers would be very small.

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