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."

Still works on it

[Laconique]

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.

Windows 8.x is un-usable without Start8

[Zeio]

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.

Re:The name Metro is already taken.

[Anonymous Coward]

Metro was never renamed to Modern UI. Modern UI is the actual interface, Metro is the design language used to create that interface. They are two separate things.

Re:Does Firefox still run on Win8 desktop UI?

[QuasiSteve]

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.

Re:Does Firefox still run on Win8 desktop UI?

[The MAZZTer]

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.

Re:Probably a tough choice to make.

[fwarren]

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.

Re:Good

[cbhacking]

You are (very) mistaken. WinRT (Windows RunTime) is an API set, a platform for running what Microsoft has (at various times) called "Metro", "Modern", "Immersive", and "Windows Store" apps. While you can make a full-screen touch-friendly UI without using WinRT, you need to use WinRT to integrate with the other "app" stuff that Win8.x does (the new task switcher, the sandboxing, the snapping, the automatic suspension in the background, etc.). To be fair, Firefox probably wasn't really trying to do that (the sandbox part, in particular, would be Really Good for them to have but would be a lot of work) so I expect it was more like what Chrome is doing, where they tack some Win32 UI functions onto their otherwise-traditional browser.

Windows RT, on the other hand, is completely different from WinRT. It can run WinRT apps, but saying they're the same thing would be like saying that Linux and the JVM are the same thing. Well, aside from the fact that those are made by different companies and don't have idiotically similar names... To the best of my knowledge, there was no real effort to port Firefox to Windows RT. I've tried doing that port myself (as a desktop application for jailbroken RT systems, not as a "Metro"/WinRT app) and it would be a tremendous amount of work.

Re:Good

[roc97007]

Thanks very much, I was powerful confused by earlier posts. So to paraphrase, WinRT is the run time API for what we call Metro, (on Intel and ARM) and Windows RT is that version of Windows (8, currently) that runs on ARM? Wow, no wonder people are confused.

Re:Good

[exomondo]

WinRT is a stripped down version of Windows that does not include the desktop or related functionality. Windows on the desktop is a superset of WinRT and includes "the interface formerly known as Metro".

No, WinRT is the Windows Runtime [wikipedia.org], it is an application platform for Metro apps. You are thinking of the operating system called Windows RT.

Re:Too much hate

[maugle]

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.

Re:Good

[Solandri]

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.

If that were all it did, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But the only way to sell a Metro app is through Microsoft's Store. And they take a 30% cut of anything sold in the store (introductory 20% deals notwithstanding).

Metro apps are Microsoft's attempt to convert the Windows software market into an iOS App Store-like walled garden, where Microsoft is the gatekeeper who collects a 30% toll on everything sold. As long as that remains true, it needs to go away.

And no Google's Play store is not the same. Google doesn't restrict app installation to the Play store. Toggle one setting ("allow installation from unknown sources") and you can install anything you want. You can install apps bought from other stores (Amazon being the most notable alternative). You can side-load apps via USB, microSD card, or cloud storage. Heck, you can download an app over any website.