Chrome no longer supports Mac OS X 10.5

https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2599452&p=ui_mac_leopard_support

by pizza • 14 years ago

28 63 14 years ago

support.google.com

mhurron2• 14 years ago

Well neither does Apple. That's still kind of irritating for those that have a PPC Mac though.

Jyaif• 14 years ago

Chrome has never worked on PPC Macs.

mhurron2• 14 years ago

Wow really? This is even less of a story then. Snow Leopard worked head and shoulders better on Intel Macs then Leopard did.

reustle2• 14 years ago

"In addition, you’ll be unable to install Chrome on any Mac still running 10.5"

This kind of stuff needs to stop. Chrome in particular has the whole fancy installer thing. What if I have an old machine sitting around that I simply need chrome on (even an older version)? Don't support it, that is fine, but don't prevent me from doing something that used to be possible.

binarycrusader3• 14 years ago

What? This is not a case where the simply flipped a magic flag in the installer to prevent you from using software "just because". The belief is that they are doing this because they're requiring a new version of the OS -- they're using newer APIs that aren't available in 10.5.

marbletiles• 14 years ago

They mean you will not be able to install existing versions. The ones that presently work.

reustle2• 14 years ago

For example, downloading Chrome v10 may work on 10.5 now, but downloading Chrome v10 will not work in the future. That's not how software versioning works. I could be wrong (and I hope I am) but I remember fighting with this a few years ago on a windows machine.

sidcool• 14 years ago

Isn't that news a bit old?

Timmy_C• 14 years ago

What surprises me is that Chrome is still supported on Windows XP. I'm further surprised that you can run Chrome on a Pentium 3 if you're running Linux. The first Pentium 3 computers were introduced in 1999.

jrajav• 14 years ago

Microsoft still supports Windows XP. Apple does not still support 10.5.

denzil_correa• 14 years ago

Isn't this at odds against the Chrome OS motivation/aim?

ionforce2• 14 years ago

Not if the market share for 10.5 is super small or the cost of maintaining older APIs is too high.

alanh4• 14 years ago

Perhaps in theory, but 10.5 is a small slice of OS X users (and three versions behind, now, which means more than it does in the Windows world.)

dos12• 14 years ago

Apple's incessant need to obsolete their old operating systems is surprising to me. I would think this would hurt their overall adoption rates (especially long term) as people get sick of constantly upgrading their OS and dealing with any fallout that results.

I for one will never run OSX again due to the constant need for upgrades. I have one of the original Intel MacBooks (with the Core Duo) and after upgrading to 10.6 my wireless card quit working. Rolling back to 10.5 fixed it. Although, with their popularity skyrocketing, maybe I'm the only one who has issues with new OSX versions.

ionforce2• 14 years ago

Yes. You got it. You are the only one. Next.

Maybe Apple's "incessant need to obsolete" is part of their secret sauce. They're doing pretty well for themselves these days. Look at Microsoft, Captain "Never Break Anything". How are they doing?

RegEx• 14 years ago

You're not clever, you're just rude.

alanh4• 14 years ago

I love updating my Mac. Each new version makes it better, and problems seem to be minor and rare. It’s worlds different from the Windows upgrade <del>rat-race</del> <ins>process</ins>.

That said, yes, the hardware seems to have a shorter shelf-life than would be ideal. Your computer is, what, 2005 vintage? Seven years is too short, but still an old age in the world of technology, and longer than most competitors’ hardware lasts.

pkamb3• 14 years ago

> Each new version makes it better

Since 10.6 that has definitely not been true.

microtonal• 14 years ago

I love updating my Mac. Each new version makes it better, and problems seem to be minor and rare. It’s worlds different from the Windows upgrade rat-race.

Huh? I am hoping that my sarcasm radar didn't pick this up. But, most software still runs perfectly fine on Windows XP. In fact, all of our university's Windows computers still run Windows XP (with up to date Creative Suite, Office, SPSS, etc. versions). Since Windows XP was released in 2001 (!), that's eleven years and counting.

What rat race?

jonknee6• 14 years ago

> I would think this would hurt their overall adoption rates (especially long term) as people get sick of constantly upgrading their OS and dealing with any fallout that results.

If by constantly you mean one time during the last five years, then yea that would be pretty annoying. The vast majority of people have moved onto a new computer or done at least one upgrade. Updates used to be more of a pain, now you just hit purchase and wait for a little bit.

If you haven't upgraded your computer in five years, you should be able to live with a browser than won't be upgraded anymore either. Apple requires 10.7.4 for Safari so you were abandoned by the Mother Ship a long time ago.

dos12• 14 years ago

Well, the last time I used OSX for daily use, it was constantly pestering me to upgrade to various point releases. Those were usually massive downloads that required a reboot. Maybe things have changed?

Along that same vein, it seemed like every time I'd boot in to OSX - iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto et all would need 100+ MB updates to stay current.

I guess my experience on the upgrade treadmill (even staying on a major version of OSX) was very unpleasant.

JackC• 14 years ago

I would think this would hurt their overall adoption rates (especially long term) as people get sick of constantly upgrading their OS and dealing with any fallout that results.

Apple's willingness to obsolete their old tech has been the plan for a long time, and works fine for them and the higher-spending niche they're targeting. Basically the pitch (to oversimplify) is: we will make technical decisions based only on supporting the last two or three years of customers. If you keep up with us, things will work great for you, because we won't be slowing things down to maintain compatibility. If you have hardware or software older than that, good luck, but it's not our problem if our new stuff doesn't work for you. The only promise is that we won't compromise the product in order to save you money.[1]

This works for Apple (and the customers who keep upgrading) because it's nice to live in an ecosystem where you can assume modern hardware and software -- for example, where developers can reasonably target multitouch trackpads or webcams or motion-graphic APIs or whatever within a year or two after they're released, and cruft can be thrown out of the OS when it's no longer needed.

As it happens, I'm one of those customers -- I spend more than half my waking life on computers, and I don't mind spending a little more to work with modern hardware, and to have an OS that assumes I have modern hardware. I'm not trying to glorify or demonize that -- it's just a business model targeted at a certain part of the market that likes it that way, or at least accepts the downsides in exchange for the upsides.

[1] Please don't feel compelled on my account to recite all the ways Apple doesn't live up to this pitch. Believe me, I know. (Quicktime 7?) I still think it's a decent approximation.

batista6• 14 years ago

>Apple's incessant need to obsolete their old operating systems is surprising to me. I would think this would hurt their overall adoption rates (especially long term) as people get sick of constantly upgrading their OS and dealing with any fallout that results.

No, it helps getting technology ahead. Instead of, you know, having hundreds of millions of people still using Windows XP, as they do.

Plus, what "fallout"? Each release has some issues for some people in some use cases, but that is irrespective of some 5 year older release getting deprecated or not. And the issues --which don't affect all, usually just a small minority, e.g the Vagrant users as of late-- get ironed out eventually with point releases.

jonknee6• 14 years ago

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.

se852• 14 years ago

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!

jonknee6• 14 years ago

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).

gaius3• 14 years ago

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.

jonknee6• 14 years ago

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....

lambda2• 14 years ago

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.

jakejake• 14 years ago

I don't really like seeing things phased out that still work perfectly well. But, selfishly I'm glad Chrome is doing this because our main software product is becoming impossible to continue supporting 10.5 as well. We already planned to phase out 10.5 support at the end of the year, but I think with large vendors like google this will hopefully make people realize that we sometimes need to upgrade in order to keep up with modern features that everybody expects.

justincormack• 14 years ago

The only reason to run 10.5 is for a ppc Mac and chrome never supported that...

Chrome no longer supports Mac OS X 10.5

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