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

Posted by timothy on from the when-the-burglars-bring-your-couch-back dept.

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."

4 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Good by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Good by sideslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Windows 8.x is un-usable without Start8 by Zeio · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:Does Firefox still run on Win8 desktop UI? by QuasiSteve · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.