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Apple Inc.'s Mac OS 10.3, the three-and-a-half-year-old operating system also known as Panther will probably not run Firefox anylonger.In a thread on the mozilla.dev.planning forum and a proposal posted to Google Docs, Mozilla developers argued whether Firefox 3.0 should run under Panther.

According to the Mozilla Corp. giving support for these versions will result in a significantly higher quality release of Gecko 1.9 [Firefox 3.0] for the vast majority of users on Mac OS X.

Dropping support for Panther would also free up engineering resources. They are already running short on time to deliver a product that works well on Tiger and Leopard.

Still others took issue with the whole idea of abandoning the older operating system. Mozilla isn't afraid of dropping support for older operating systems. On the Windows side, the company has already announced that Firefox 3.0 will not support Windows 98 and Windows Millennium, both of which were dropped from Microsoft Corp.'s own support list last summer. And last week, a Mozilla executive said the new browser, expected to ship before the end of the year, probably won't support older distributions of Linux.

Apple typically offers security updates to just two editions of Mac OS X simultaneously; after it launched Mac OS X 10.4 in April 2005, it stopped posting updates for Mac OS X 10.2, alias Jaguar.

If that trend holds true, Apple will cease security patches for Panther when it launches Leopard.