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Forums both on Mac-oriented websites and Apple's own discussion boards have been busy with the complaints from users of pre-Panther versions of OS X who feel they are being forced to upgrade to Panther by Apple's update policy.

In a brief statement Apple said, ' Safari v1.2...has been designed to leverage advances in Panther not present in the Jaguar

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release of Mac OS X. These Panther technologies are needed to deliver Safari v1.2's most significant improvements. For example, personal certificate support is made possible by Panther specific security technologies that are simply not available on Jaguar.'

It continued: 'Panther has been extremely well received by Mac users around the world and its success allows us to innovate aggressively with system applications like Safari by relying on state-of-the-art OS technology.

'Safari v1.0 continues to be available for customers running on Jaguar-based systems and has recently been updated with the latest security improvements.'

Nonetheless the controversy appears unlikely to go away. Just yesterday Apple released a Panther-specific Bluetooth update, for instance. But it would seem that the under-the-hood improvements in OS 10.3 were further reaching than most of us thought.