Re: [tor-talk] Dropping Tor Browser support for Mac OSX 10.6?

[MacLemon <tor@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey!

On 03 Sep 2014, at 06:21, Mike Perry <mikeperry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Mac OS 10.6 has been end-of-life
> Moreover dropping 10.6 support would mean that we could ship 64bit-only
> binaries for Mac
[…]
> Moreover, these 64bit binaries could be hardened with
> 10.7+ hardening options.
That would first mean to provide 64-bit binaries for OS X at all. At the moment all OS X TorBrowser Bundles' Firefox and tor binary are 32bit only.

$ file /Applications/TorBrowser.app/Contents/MacOS/TorBrowser.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox
firefox: Mach-O executable i386

$ file /Applications/TorBrowser.app/Tor/tor.real
tor.real: Mach-O executable i386

So before TBB is available as 64bit binaries, there is little benefit in moving to 10.7+ only.

> Unfortunately, roughly 19% of Mac users were still on OSX 10.6 as of
> March 2014, which is quite a lot of people.
Are there OS metrics for TBB? Couldn't find any on https://metrics.torproject.org/

Also, OS X 10.10 Yosemite is just around the corner which will EOL 10.7. Further given the fact that all Macs that support 10.8 als do support 10.9 and 10.10 this may be the better point to move to a 10.8+ build and drop 10.7 (which is a terrible release almost nobody uses) in the same process.

There are only 2 Mac models that are intel and 32bit only. So I guess the percentage of TBB users among these is mostly negligible. But a stated above, everthing is i386 atm anyway.


> should be able to use Tails on their Macs
> Is Tails a workable option for you?
Creating a Tails USB-Stick _on OS X_ is basically impossible for the general public, and a helluva process for the technically inclined. (It's not just dd the image and reboot.) So I'd say, no, at the moment, absolutely not. At least not before Tails Sticks are easy to create and stable to boot on that hardware.

Best regards
@MacLemon
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