Mozilla Scraps Firefox For Windows 8, Citing Low Adoption of Metro

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today announced it is abandoning the Metro version of its Firefox browser, before the first release for Windows 8 even sees the light of day. Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale ordered the company's engineering leads and release managers to halt development earlier this week, saying that shipping a 1.0 version "would be a mistake." Mozilla says it simply does not have the resources nor the scale of its competitors, and it has to pick its battles. The Metro platform (which has since been renamed to Modern UI, but many prefer the older name) simply doesn't help the organization achieve its mission as well as other platforms Firefox is available for: Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android."

Comments

Good

[Sir_Sri]

Good, lets not waste time and resources metroifying things that need not be, at least not until we get some clarity from microsoft on what they're going to do to fix the mess from windows 8. They could keep the metro language and so on, but they might be better to wipe some of that slate clean for windows 9 and apologize for fucking up so badly. And how they try and fix it could beak anything people would be working on now.

Re:Good

[sideslash]

The idea some people got that all existing Windows apps were supposed to be rewritten as Modern Apps is certainly wrong.

However, the idea that the WinRT / Modern App platform needs to go away in a future Windows version is also misguided. What you refer to as "Metro" fills a useful function that isn't otherwise served on Windows, which is enabling touch screen use, and it does a very nice job of that. True, there aren't many Windows tablets or touch monitors out there, but the number of them is increasing every day, and it would be stupid of Microsoft to ditch the whole WinRT effort now.

If you want to make the case that keyboard and mouse users shouldn't have to look at the Modern UI if they don't want to... why then I will heartily agree.

Re:Good

[SJHillman]

The way I understood his post is that we shouldn't abandon Metro because it serves a purpose on RT, regardless of whether or not it belongs on other platforms. I don't think RT needs to go away so much as it needs a name that doesn't use "Windows"

Re:I don't get it

[Tridus]

Yes.

I mean, strictly speaking it's entirely doable. But it's another UI to build, test, and support. That stuff isn't free, and Mozilla doesn't have infinite resources. Considering the general lack of interest in Metro and the fact that the current version works just fine on Windows 8 as a desktop application, they decided it wasn't worth the cost.

It's an entirely sensible thing to do. Metro is hardly setting the world on fire.

Re:Windows 8.x is un-usable without Start8

[geek]

And yet you bought and use Windows 8 rather than abstaining and hitting MS in the pocket book where it counts. They really learned a lesson there.

Re:Too much hate

[MightyMartian]

Translation: I'm a Redmond shill trying to sound reasonable, but I can't help but make blatantly pro-Redmond statements like "significantly better than a comparative Tablet OS"

Do you have any fucking shame? More importantly, do you think we're fucking idiots that we don't recognize you for who you are?

Re:Who in the world...

[epyT-R]

overweight soccer moms running the weightwatchers app. Their kids chatting on failbook.

It's sad, but computing has finally become mainstream enough to start degenerating along with the rest of society.