Firefox 3 May Drop Support for OS X 10.3 Panther

Mozilla has floated a proposal to drop support for Mac OS X Panther in the upcoming version of Firefox 3. The proposal, written by Josh Aas, Mozilla's primary Mac OS X developer, can be found on Google Docs.

Aas, writes:

Dropping support for Panther would also free up engineering resources and allow us to take advantage of APIs that only became available on Tiger. We have made a huge number of great changes to our Mac OS X code for Gecko 1.9, but we still have a lot of work to do and we are already running short on time to deliver a product that works well on Tiger and Leopard.

Mozilla is hardly the first software maker to consider dropping Panther support for the next version of its product, in fact, the move is not entirely unexpected.

Radical changes in many aspects of the underlying architecture in Panther versus Tiger have already led a number of developers to drop support for Panther. Textmate, a popular OS X text editor, has said it will drop both Panther and Tiger support for its next major revision, which will be Leopard-only.

Mozilla has not actually made a decision yet, the plan is still in the discussion stage. If you'd like to follow the debate, head over to the developer mailing list page and read through the thread. There are some good arguments on both sides of the debate.