The Metro version of Firefox for Windows 8 has been pulled by Mozilla, so users holding their breath for a tablet friendly version of Firefox are out of luck. It is likely Mozilla may never put more development time into this project after this, so it might be wise to consider this as the end.
Mozilla first announced a Metro version of Firefox for Windows 8 way back in 2012, but it took up until 2014 for Mozilla to release a beta version. But with just around 1,000 users were testing the beta version of the browser, a stable version was never released.
In fact, this low usage forced Mozilla to end its plans to bring Firefox to Windows 8's touch interface.
"As the team built and tested and refined the product, we've been watching Metro's adoption. From what we can see, it's pretty flat," says Johnathan Nightingale, VP Firefox via the company's blog. "On any given day we have, for instance, millions of people testing pre-release versions of Firefox desktop, but we've never seen more than 1000 active daily users in the Metro environment."
"This leaves us with a hard choice. We could ship it, but it means doing so without much real-world testing. That's going to mean lots of bugs discovered in the field, requiring a lot of follow up engineering, design, and QA effort. To ship it without doing that follow up work is not an option. If we release a product, we maintain it through end of life. When I talk about the need to pick our battles, this feels like a bad one to pick: significant investment and low impact," Nightingale said.
There could be many factors as to why Mozilla failed in its bid to get users to use Firefox in the Metro environment for Windows 8.
One such issue could be due to the difficulty in switching from desktop to Metro. In our testing, we found that we had to make Firefox the default browser, then go into settings to switch it over to the touch environment in Windows 8.
The experience wasn't seamless when compared to Internet Explorer 11, and no doubt could have been a turn off for many users.
