[willed]

Was disappointed to find that the Safari update is OS10.3 only. Does Apple always drop OS support this soon?

[JLL]

They didn't release Safari 1.1 either.

Security updates, iLife and other apps are released for Jaguar though.

They probably don't want to maintain WebKit for 10.2.x.

[voodoo]

I'd recommend Mozilla if you can't run the latest Safari.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by voodoo:
I'd recommend Mozilla if you can't run the latest Safari.

I'd recommend Firebird or Camino for Safari users on 10.2 over Mozilla, just because they're more similar to Safari, but you have the right idea. These apps support several of the features which Safari just got for the 1.1 and 1.2 releases.

This said, I can somewhat see why Apple is doing this. Later versions of Safari depend heavily on features which Just Don't Exist in 10.2, particularly as concerns their text APIs (I'm thinking text-shadow support mainly, but there are other things). These are things which even Mozilla hasn't been able to do on any platform. Do you expect Apple to backport large portions of Panther just to make newer versions of Safari -a free product- run? I don't see people complaining about iLife's latest versions. Why only Safari?

Apple still supports 10.2, as evidenced by the security updates. It's quite reasonable to expect Apple to support security updates in these operating systems for a while yet. But new apps? There, I'm afraid, a line is drawn.

[mitchell_pgh]

Apple Apologist Here:

I wouldn't say it's so much dropping support as using new features only available in OS X 10.3.

They updated WebCore in 10.3, so it's not going to work with older OS versions.