At the start of the year, Mozilla made the decision to push the release of Firefox for Metro to March 18, though no reasons were given by the organisation for the change in schedule. Now, just days before the new deadline, Firefox vice president Johnathan Nightingale has announced the Windows 8 flavour of the browser is off the table.
Nightingale provides a convincing argument for dumping the project — the numbers just weren’t there to justify the work — and eventual ongoing support — Firefox for Metro would require. According to Nightingale, while “millions” of users are constantly attacking test builds of regular Firefox, the Metro version struggled to get over 1000 users per day.
Seeing this statistic, or more accurately, the lack of improvement in it, was enough for Mozilla to pull the plug. Nightingale states that the company “opens up the risk” of having to ship Firefox for Metro should interest suddenly spike, but the odds of that are remote given the browser’s very users have “shown little interest in adopting” Microsoft’s latest operating system.
It’s unlikely anyone will be crying deeply into their pillows over the news, but along with the recently disposed-of Persona ID system, it suggests Mozilla is keeping a closer eye on the value of its ongoing projects.
Update on Metro [Mozilla]
Comments
2 responses to “Mozilla Has Dumped Firefox For Metro”
Regular chrome/ff is fine for most things on touch devices, but they do have some pretty annoying problems at times. It would be nice if they made a metro compatible view or something.
Aww, ff was the only browser that actually had a good metro version. Now I’ll have to back to IE 🙁
It’d be fine if chrome supported high-DPI at least :\ Maybe opera might make one *looks hopeful*