The end of OS X Mavericks... kind of

OS X Mavericks was the last skeuomorphic version of macOS. It was released in 2013, so it's over a decade old. Therefore, almost no apps support it anymore, including web browsers. However, Firefox 78.15.0esr has been working well for a lot of websites. Unfortunately, it seems things have changed. On this article about Firefox on OS X Mavericks, a user commented that in December 2024, sites such as Reddit, Yahoo!, and Facebook give a warning message, therefore making them no longer supported. As for me, I haven't experienced many issues, and can even visit Reddit and Yahoo! just fine:

However, since this browser is still old, not every website works. For example, trying to sign in to Discord results in just a white screen:

Considering Discord was released two years after OS X Mavericks came out, this doesn't seem like much of a surprise, but it did previously work in Firefox. It just doesn't work now.

If you don't use Discord, you might think it's not that big of a deal. So why does this blog entry have such a negative title? Well, it seems like things will be coming to an end. Upon restarting my virtual machine and opening Firefox, it opened to this page:

According to this page, first of all, I'm on an older version of Firefox. Thanks for telling me, Mozilla, it's like I didn't know that already! /s

Anyways, it tells me that on January 14, 2025 (9 days from me publishing this), a root certificate will expire, which will cause "some preferences and other features to stop working". It tells me to update for the best browsing experience. Well, obviously, since OS X Mavericks is over a decade old, Mozilla isn't providing Firefox updates anymore.

So, what does this mean? Originally, I thought this giant header was trying to communicate that Firefox will mostly no longer work in OS X Mavericks. This confused me, because I don't see how a root certificate could stop a browser from loading most pages. 

You may notice that there is a link to read more, which I originally didn't plan on doing, because I'm emulating OS X Mavericks using UTM on my 2020 MacBook Pro. Because I'm not virtualizing, it runs very slowly, and I didn't want to try reading a whole bunch of text that way. However, it seems the link that it brought me to will show the message in any browser, even non-Firefox ones like Safari. If you want to go to it, here's the link: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/welcome/20/

I opened the link in a modern browser in macOS Sequoia and decided to read about this change. Does this mean browsing the web on OS X Mavericks is almost dead? Well, no, not exactly.

If you go to "Read more about this change", you're brought to a Firefox Support article. The article says that basically, a root certificate for verifying signed content and add-ons will expire. Without updating, all add-ons will be disabled, and DRM-protected content may also stop playing.

So, although Firefox won't just stop working, add-ons that could be very useful for old operating systems like uBlock Origin will. And if you use OS X Mavericks to watch streaming services such as Disney+ or Netflix, these may also stop working. This is unfortunate, because although most people aren't using OS X Mavericks as a daily driver, some may do, and no longer being able to use extensions or watch DRM-protected content in one of the newest browsers for the old OS makes it almost not worth it to use the browser in the first place. This is also the last version of OS X with a lot of skeuomorphism, so anyone that wants to browse the web without worrying about the root certificate will have to upgrade to a flatter operating system.

Users using even older operating systems like Windows Vista and 7 can still browse the internet fine with browsers like Supermium and r3dfox, but no one has been making web browsers for old OS X versions, or at least none that I've heard of. If you know of any web browsers that are still being made for OS X Mavericks, leave a comment!

tl;dr: A root certificate expiring will cause the last version of Firefox of OS X Mavericks to no longer work with extensions and have potential issues with DRM-protected content, but the browser will still work as normal as an outdated browser can work.