1298054 - Deprecate support for iOS 8

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for iOS :: General, defect, P1)

Comment 1

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

With iOS 10 around the corner, this is a good time to finally drop 8 support.

Comment 2

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Not requiring these #available checks for iOS 9 will make life easier for bug 1304456, and we'll have to eventually do this anyway, so let's go ahead and knock this one out now.

Comment 3

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Attachment: Link to Github pull-request: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/pull/2111

Comment 4

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

Comment on attachment 8793503 [details] [review]
Link to Github pull-request: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/pull/2111

Awesome. Thanks for fixing the keychain stuff I missed in the test targets.

Comment 5

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/commit/a2467d72e0ffd01688311ddceec1e919fea7e68a

Comment 6

[Maurya Talisetti]

Hi Brian,

Was there any burden, code-wise, or any compromises we had to make, that we dropped support for iOS 8? I thought it was only the 'if #available' checks that were extra.

Just curious, since I'm on iPhone 4s/iOS 8 and don't want to move to iOS 9 as it might slow it down.

Comment 7

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Hi Maurya,

There's a growing number of features and APIs with each iOS release, so maintaining support for older releases becomes a huge maintenance burden.

Examples from iOS 9:
* Private browsing
* Clearing private data
* New XCTest APIs

This list will grow longer with iOS 10.

Code-wise, we worked around many of these using 'if #available' checks as you said, but maintaining support for 8 means we also need to test and run iOS 8 builds often to make sure they're stable. We were already neglecting iOS 8 before; we just don't have the resources to maintain 8, 9, *and* 10 now.

Comment 8

[Maurya Talisetti]

Hmm, yeah that sounds reasonable. Thanks for your reply!