Mac OS X Tiger: Due for extinction?

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference next week in San Francisco, developers may hear whether Apple will continue to support the semi-long-in-the-tooth version of Mac OS X, Version 10.4, aka Tiger. With developers currently dropping support in updates, Apple discontinuing patches, its days appear very numbered. Based on Net Applications' NetMarketShare OS version statistics, Tiger has about a 0.73 share of the total browser market share. But what does that mean to the Mac market? When you add all the reported Mac OS versions, Leopard (2.23), Snow Leopard (2.06) and No Version (0.15), Tiger has a 14 percent share of the Mac browser market. That's still several million users. However, Tiger is increasingly being overlooked for updates. In February, the Mozilla development team said it would not support Tiger in the next major update of Firefox.

The approximately 25 percent of our Mac OS X users still on 10.4 would  continue to be supported by Firefox 3.6 until that product reaches end  of service, which won't be until several months after the next major  version of Firefox is delivered (built on Gecko 1.9.3) later this  year. Past data shows that we do not lose appreciable market share when we stop supporting a Mac OS X version. We are often one of the last vendors to continue supporting older Mac OS X releases, and I  suspect that by the time this becomes an issue Apple may themselves have stopped issuing security updates for Mac OS X 10.4.

As far as I can see, the last major security update for Tiger was 2009-005, which was released in Sept. It was in two parts, one for Intel Macs and the other for PowerPC systems.

In a recent post on Lowend Mac, Charles Moore pointed out that Tiger is becoming a browser orphan. This is an issue for owners of PPC Macs that can only run Tiger. For developers, this support question isn't just one of market share. Starting with the release of Leopard, most developers have made new titles Leopard only (Snow Leopard, same difference). This migration started early in the Leopard release cycle, as I reported in 2008. There was too much goodness in Leopard/Snow Leopard and too much effort required for a Tiger version. (There are Snow Leopard-only software titles now, btw.) At past WWDCs, there's been a bit of campy humor about the stopping of support for old APIs and architectures. For example, in 2002 with the introduction of Mac OS X Jaguar,  Steve Jobs came onstage with a coffin and accompanied by J. S. Bachs "Toccata and Fugue in D minor." He told the audience that the old Mac OS 9 may not be dead yet to customers, but it would be for developers. "Today we say farewell to OS 9 for all future development, and we focus our energies on developing for Mac OS X," Jobs said at the time. Perhaps the same scene will be played for Mac OS X Tiger and the final vestiges of Apple's PowerPC experiment.