Mozilla’s Ending the Firefox Support on Mac OS X 10.7, 10.7 and 10.8

Mozilla has announced that they will officially end the Firefox support for Apple customers using Mac OS X versions 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8. The termination will come in August, 2016. At that time, Firefox will continue to function on these platforms, but will stop receiving new feature or security updates.

None of these three OS X versions had a market share above 10% among Mac users, according to statistics at the end of October 2015. The biggest chunk belonged to Snow Leopard, yet most Mac users already started migrating to Mavericks (10.9), Yosemite (10.10) and El Capitan (10.11).

Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) 45 will continue to support OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 until mid-2017, yet this ESR release will be the last that supports them.

All these three versions are no longer supported by Apple itself, so the Mozilla strongly encourages their users to upgrade to a version of OS X currently supported by Apple. Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates and are dangerous for people to use. Here are two options you can have:

Option 1: Switch to A New Computer

Apple terminated the support for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) in 2007, and in 2009, the supported ended for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). For OS X 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8, many software developers have either dropped support for these older systems, or soon will. You best bet is to get a computer capable of running the latest version of Mac OS X. This is the most secure option and will allow you to run the latest and greatest Firefox.

Option 2: Continue to Use Your Older Mac and Older Firefox

If you can’t switch to a newer computer, you can continue to use these three OS X versions. However you will no longer receive stability and security updates from Firefox. See the Security Advisories for Firefox for a list of vulnerabilities fixed in past releases.