Mozilla Scraps Firefox For Windows 8, Citing Low Adoption of Metro 200
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."
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Before I agree or disagree, I have to ask: are you equating the Modern UI with WinRT? Unless I'm mistaken, they are not the same thing. WinRT uses the Modern UI but the Modern UI is not exclusive to WinRT.
Having said that, I would disagree and state that WinRT does need to go away; if it looks like Windows and feels like Windows but doesn't run Windows apps then it's confusing.
At the same time, I recently upgraded my laptop from Win7 to Win 8.1 (I got the $15 upgrade to Win8 Pro way back when) and I'm getting used to the Start menu now being the Modern UI Start screen. When I remote in using Remote Desktop from my iPad, it feels quite natural and useful. When I'm at my machine and using a mouse, not so much.
Re:Windows 8.x is un-usable without Start8 (Score:5, Interesting)
Some particular reason you chose to spend money instead of getting the free and open-source Classic Start Menu (from Classic Shell)? Seems kind of silly.
Anyhow, I happen to think you're an idiot if you can't use the same UI (and by far the most productive one) that's been present in Windows since Vista, namely "hit Start (or the Windows key), type a few letters of the program name, hit Enter". It's faster than any mouse-driven interaction and doesn't require manually finding anything in cascading menus *or* scrolling screens of tiles. But that's just, like, my opinion, man...
It's questionable whether typing stuff, even just a few letters, should always be considered faster and/or more productive than using a mouse. Sometimes, especially on a laptop, it's a pain to keep shifting from mouse to keyboard and back. Besides, since when is running a particular program the only thing you would ever want to do on a given operating system?
Windows 8 if filled with non-intuitive commands, and offers almost nothing of value in return for scaling its rather steep learning curve. It wasn't wanted or needed by anyone outside Microsoft, and it will eventually be abandoned and completely forgotten by everyone outside of a few business textbooks, where it will stand forever as a classic example of a large corporation shooting itself in the foot.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
> If Microsoft called the devices and software layer WinTouch or something, that might have helped a little, as a lot of people have been disappointed that a "Windows" computer can't run legacy mouse/keyboard Windows apps.
IIRC that was true of Windows CE also, and cause considerable confusion back then. Everything old is new again etc etc.
I think that this is one more issue that stems with wanting to call everything "windows".
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea some people got that all existing Windows apps were supposed to be rewritten as Modern Apps is certainly wrong.
What's the point of having nice big buttons to touch to launch an app if you still have to use a mouse to use the app?