Mozilla kills Firefox ‘Metro’ app for Windows 8

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Although Mozilla has previously offered a pre-release version of the Metro version of Firefox for Windows 8 devices, the Mozilla team now says that it “would be a mistake” to keep up with the development due to the lack of interest from users.

According to statistics from Mozilla’s servers, the usage of the beta version of Firefox for Windows 8 never passed the 1,000 users, which is totally different when they see millions of users testing the desktop version of Firefox — that is of course, counting every platform the browser supports, including Windows, OS X, and Linux.

“This leaves us with a hard choice. We could ship it, but it means doing so without much real-world testing. That’s going to mean lots of bugs discovered in the field, requiring a lot of follow up engineering, design, and QA effort. To ship it without doing that follow up work is not an option. If we release a product, we maintain it through end of life.” — Johnathan Nightingale vice president of Firefox sates.

The development started back in 2012 to build a Metro-style version of Firefox. Mozilla began by building Firefox based on the x86 architecture; however, because of Microsoft policy, the open source platform never created a Firefox for Windows RT which is based on ARM chips. So we’ll never know how many users would picked Firefox over Internet Explorer in this platform.

Mozilla stopping and leaving Windows 8 without a Metro-style version of Firefox isn’t definite. The company says that it will consider resume the project when the Windows 8 Metro takes off, but for now don’t expect anything else to be released.

Source Mozilla

About the author

Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 14 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me.