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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."
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.
It's just the app for w8 and frankly since many people use the windows 7 hidden under 8, and not w8 proper apps,where normal FF would work, it sounds like a reasonable decision.
Without Start8 and ModernMix or Classic Shell or whatever , Windows 8.x is not useable.
I gladly have for the first time ever used a pay-for program to fix how bad default Windows shell is. I was annoyed classic start was gone from windows 7 but I got used to it.
Windows 8 is a special kind of strange. Microsoft should learn to SKIN to whatever the old version looked like to keep people from having to retrain. The metro apps stink without modern mix.
Microsoft's new CEO should put a stop to this loser behavior. under the hood, the OS isnt half bad.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
It's that it's too different. It's a well argued fact that the 2 major mobile OSes are very similar programatticaly to their desktop brethren. In fact, the only visual different between iOS/Android and Mac/Windows is the lack of a multi-window interface. Almost every widget could be seen on both desktops and touch screens in some shape or form, and as such, coding a browser such as Firefox for any of them platforms is much the same regardless of platform. The problem with Metro is it's just too different. It's very hard to convert an interface written for, say, win32 to the new Metro interface simply because there's not many similarities. And herein lies the issues. If developers can't easily code for your API, they won't, and hence Mozilla's stance.
It's a dead platform anyway. I wonder if in 5 years we'll remember it as fondly as we currently remember Vista.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Yes, it still works just fine as a desktop app. This is just about making a special version that plays nice in the Metro/Modern UI 'tiles' environment. You can already just drop a shortcut to the FireFox desktop app on there if you think it's a nice launcher, of course.
Of course it does. Microsoft is very good with backwards compatibility, especially from NT onward, and that's assuming Mozilla wasn't interested in supporting their most commonly used platform (I'm pretty sure Windows is). This is just talking about the port to Metro, which has seen poor reception.
Of course I doubt Firefox would have been a "true" Metro app... I don't think Chrome was... as part of MS' attempt to be anti-competitive with web browsers in Windows 8, they allow the default web browser to inject itself into Metro, but still run outside of the sandbox (otherwise, they would have to use the IE rendering engine! At least AFAIK). But you still want the UI to look Metro. Anyway, if the browser is not the default, it can still run but only on the desktop in its traditional UI. This restriction also applies to IE.
Define 'a Metro interface'.
If you just mean the look&feel / 'touch interface'-friendliness, then no, it's not hard at all.
If you mean having it play nice in the Metro/Modern UI interface (the tiles thing, full-screen apps optionally with sidebar, live updates, notifications, all that)... apparently that's a bit harder. Just ask the VLC people.
Of course there's not much of a reason to even use that on desktop Windows anyway, but it would have been a pretty good step toward also providing FireFox for Windows RT / ARM-based devices like the Surface (not to be confused with the Surface Pro) and Windows Phone.
After 18 months, "Metro" is not a roaring success. Firefoxes absense on Metro will only hurt WinRT users. By definition, being a WinRT users they have already decided they are going to have a stripped down experience.
I don't think Mozilla is losing anything here.
vi +
Steve Balmer is jumping up and down on his beach chair.
I assume just having a fullscreen version of Mozilla for the Metro interface isn't good enough?
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Not to mention trying to change the channel after Metro was met with an abysmal reaction. They didn't want another situation like Vista, where the name itself is toxic.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The only thing the VLC Metro app does is crash.
Good-bye
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?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
I am completely flabberghasted. They can't even keep backwards compatibility from one version of word to the next. It friggin blows my mind that someone would come here and post something that absurd. Seriously.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yeah, whoever comes up with names at Microsoft really needs to get promoted to somewhere useless. The Xbox One, which is not the same as the Xbox one, and is in fact the Xbox three, being the sequel to the Xbox 360... that one is so stupid it makes me angry.
Another bad decision from Firefox. My company's moving to Windows 8. We'll be sticking with Chrome, which has a simple toggle between standard and metro. Every laptop made today is a touchscreen, and Windows 8 is awesome on a touchscreen.
I don't respond to AC's.
Bullshit? Not likely. My parents were just forced to buy a new version of Word, because the WORD documents they were getting sent looked like crap in older version of WORD they had.
Tell that to my dad, who used to be perfectly happy playing Freecell, and writing things down in a spreadsheet while crunching numbers with the calculator program (yes, you can do calculations in Excel, but no, he doesn't trust it). He also had a backup scheduled to run once a week.
In Windows 8.1, the godawful Calculator app takes up the entire screen, so good luck copying numbers back and forth. I tried to help him schedule a backup like before, but the only solution I found was a 3-freaking-lines-long powershell command. To top it off, Windows 8 is unable to read the backup files made by Windows XP (what the hell, Microsoft?!). And Freecell and Solitaire are nowhere to be found!
Vast improvement to home users my ass. It's harder to do things that used to be easy, and downright impossible to do things that used to be merely complicated.
Nobody's using that crappy interface anyway. I use Windows 8.1 myself and it's fairly easy to completely hide almost all elements of that awful thing and stay completely in the classic desktop environment. With the addition of Start 8 you can have the START button back and disable all those useless 'charms' (stupid name too) and other 'modern' crap.
The classic Firefox works just fine on the desktop where it belongs, as do the other browsers by the way.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
And before someone asks: The yearly revenue of Metro AG (66 billion EUR ~ 90 billion USD) is larger than that of Microsoft (77 billion USD).
Offtopic, but in addition to LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org, FreeOffice (the free version of Softmaker Office) is very handy. Download it at freeoffice.com.
I mainly use Office 2003 with modern format addons, but also have LO and Softmaker Office Pro installed. The latter two saved me several times when Office 2003 freaked out on some docs.