‘Many Snow Leopard users unsafe as Apple stops updates’ – update
Apple will no longer release security updates for its OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ operating system. On February 25, Apple released security updates for its operating systems, but not for version 10.6. Many Mac users are still running Snow Leopard.
The vulnerability in Mavericks that was patched by Apple on February 25 was an SSL leak that made it possible to discover the content of https traffic. Apple released a patch for this and also released other security patches for OS X Mavericks, Lion, and Mountain Lion, but not Snow Leopard. It can therefore be assumed that OS X 10.6 will no longer receive security updates at all, although Apple does not officially say anything about this.
One in five Mac users would still be running the now insecure Snow Leopard, according to ComputerWorld. According to NetApplications, even more users are running 10.6 than 10.7. Users can have various reasons for not switching. Some may worry that new versions will run less smoothly on their hardware than Snow Leopard, while users may also want to include the Rosetta software, which allows PowerPC applications to run prior to Apple’s 2006 transition to the x86 platform. . Rosetta will not work on version 10.7 and later editions of OS X.
In December of 2013, Snow Leopard got its last Safari update, and in September of the same year, the last security update took place. Snow Leopard has been supported by Apple for a total of about four years. The support window was slightly longer than before 10.5, but a few months shorter than the previous 10.4 version. So it’s not uncommon for Apple to stop releasing updates after four years. Because Apple does not communicate an official support lifecycle policy to users, many users do not know this.
The situation is similar to that of Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. Microsoft has officially announced that it will stop updating that system in April, after having pushed the deadline several times.
Update, Friday 08.16: The article stated that the major ssl leak occurred on multiple versions of OS X while this is only the case with Mavericks. The article has been adapted accordingly.