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Mozilla Scraps Firefox Metro Over Flat Adoption Rate

By - Source: Mozilla | B 22 comments

End of the line before Metro Firefox ever got off the ground.

Two years after Mozilla first verbalized plans for a Windows 8 version of Firefox, the foundation has abandoned its Metro Firefox. Speaking via blog post, Mozilla's Jonathan Nightingale said that last week he asked engineering leads and release managers to take the Windows Metro version of Firefox off the rails.

Nightingale says that while the team is 'solid and did good work,' shipping a 1.0 version of Firefox Metro would be a mistake. The bottom line is that Mozilla isn't seeing much activity in the pre-release version. In fact, according to Nightingale, on any given day, they've never seen more than 1,000 active daily users. 

"In late 2012, when I started up the Firefox for Metro team (I know that's not what Microsoft calls it anymore, but it remains how we talk about it in Mozilla), it looked like the next battleground for the Web," Nightingale wrote, later adding: "In the months since, 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."

In the end, Mozilla feels that to ship a largely untested (and therefore buggy) product requiring a ton of follow up work would be to invest in a platform that users show little sign of adopting. And that's a cost it isn't willing to bear.

We've contacted Microsoft for comment on this and will update if we hear back.

[Update] A Microsoft spokesperson we talked to said the company is choosing not to comment on this one.

Follow Jane McEntegart @JaneMcEntegart. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

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  • 8 Hide
    red77star , March 17, 2014 11:56 AM
    Smart decision
  • 1 Hide
    ethanolson , March 17, 2014 12:01 PM
    How is it not possible to have a traditional Windows program not feed a Metro app? I'd think that all you'd need is a Metro portal into the Desktop app. What am I missing here?
  • -9 Hide
    AndrewMD , March 17, 2014 12:09 PM
    most people using metro apps are not going to download another browser to surf the web... Firefox in general is not in the same place it was back in the day. Chrome browser has taken care of the marketshare that Firefox once had....
  • Display all 22 comments.
  • -7 Hide
    HombreGranJefe , March 17, 2014 1:39 PM
    I would've used it if I knew it ******* existed. Thanks Firefox. You ****** this up, not us or MS. I hope someone provides a better browser solution than IE or MS ads an ad-blocker to it. Then I'd be happy.
  • -7 Hide
    K2N hater , March 17, 2014 1:44 PM
    I couldn't care less about metro especially for web browsing but the fact is firefox/aurora are nowhere as touch-friendly as IE/Google.
  • 0 Hide
    sykozis , March 17, 2014 3:05 PM
    Didn't even know there was a version of Firefox for Metro.... Maybe the marketing team at Mozilla should learn to do their jobs properly....If you go to the settings menu in Chrome and select "Relaunch Chrome in Windows 8 mode" you essentially get ChromeOS.....running in Windows.
  • 2 Hide
    ta152h , March 17, 2014 4:30 PM
    I have Windows 8.1, and Metro is useless. You can't really use it, it's horrible. It's causing the collapse of Microsoft, even though the OS is better than Windows 7 except for the ridiculous Metro nonsense. Basically, the way you use 8.1 is to make it act like Metro doesn't exist. Touch screens are pretty lame. It's slower than a mouse, and you get the screen dirty. Leave it for tablets. For real machines, forget it. Firefox made the right choice. Metro is dying, not growing. The market has decided. Firefox just went along with that decision.
  • -4 Hide
    Nolonar , March 17, 2014 4:34 PM
    Weird... last I heard, they're still working on Firefox OS. The low adoption rate can't be their true reason for dropping this.
  • 6 Hide
    USAFRet , March 17, 2014 4:48 PM
    Quote:
    I would've used it if I knew it ******* existed. Thanks Firefox. You ****** this up, not us or MS. I hope someone provides a better browser solution than IE or MS ads an ad-blocker to it. Then I'd be happy.


    Tone down the language, please.
  • -5 Hide
    marclee37 , March 17, 2014 4:52 PM
    i have no idea what is firefox metro.i would hope firefox to amend itself to have better support on win8. when on touch screen, the IE can easily zoom in zoom out with fingers, firefox can't do it yet. so as many other open source software. touch is the new and must-go trend, it is much more intuitive in many cases, especially on sub 11" screen.in the other article- it said the default image viewer on win8 has its shortcoming, but its biggest advantage is its easy zooming capabilities. depends on situation i would choose the right software to use.
  • 1 Hide
    CodeMatias , March 17, 2014 5:10 PM
    Quote:
    How is it not possible to have a traditional Windows program not feed a Metro app? I'd think that all you'd need is a Metro portal into the Desktop app. What am I missing here?
    You're not missing anything, that's exactly what is going on. The metrofox is just a metro based front end that works ONLY in Windows 8 (not RT). The main reason nobody bothered with metrofox is that you could only get it with the alpha builds and always had to deal with the garbage that came along with that.
  • 3 Hide
    antilycus , March 17, 2014 7:52 PM
    Metro is what is going to bring MS to it's knees. The only people that can't see this are the people that think MS still has the answers and these same people refuse to believe the Linux and Open Source software (which still brings in money to dev houses) is the future. Times change, you can die with the past and grow with the demands of the future. "Old Timers" still reading their AS400 / IBM Operation Manual won't ever agree... nor will the programmer dependant on .NET's IDE to walk them through their coding
  • -4 Hide
    Misterbear , March 17, 2014 8:15 PM
    For all the effort, delays, awful coding, and marketing silence, Mozilla should really declare it a vaporware hoax.
  • -2 Hide
    scrumworks , March 18, 2014 12:15 AM
    Smart move Mozilla. Windows 8 with Metro is the biggest fail from Microsoft since Vista. People hate those stupid tiles in desktop AND in a phone (that is why WP is a failure). I'm keeping my W7 until I get a decent DESKTOP OS update I can use efficiently with a mouse and a keyboard for WORK and gaming.
  • -1 Hide
    SteelCity1981 , March 18, 2014 1:50 AM
    there is an easier way just go to search type in Set Default Programs and set the default program to windows photo viewer.
  • 4 Hide
    eza , March 18, 2014 5:30 AM
    "In the end, Mozilla feels that to ship a largely untested (and therefore buggy) product requiring a ton of follow up work would be to invest in a platform that users show little sign of adopting."Were Mozilla referring to Windows 8 here? Ho ho.;-)
  • -1 Hide
    Nolonar , March 18, 2014 6:06 AM
    Quote:
    "In the end, Mozilla feels that to ship a largely untested (and therefore buggy) product requiring a ton of follow up work would be to invest in a platform that users show little sign of adopting."Were Mozilla referring to Windows 8 here? Ho ho.;-)

    Windows 8 alone has a wider adoption than all versions of Linux and OSX together.
    Considering Windows is the only desktop platform without a native 64 bit version (aside from Nightly builds), we can safely assume they were not talking about 8 as a whole; more like Modern UI.
  • 1 Hide
    Semen Frish , March 18, 2014 7:43 AM
    Actually IE on Win Phone works surprisingly nice :p 
  • 1 Hide
    Osmin , March 18, 2014 11:32 AM
    Having Windows 8 support tablet apps is a neat feature, if the Metro apps worked inside of a window without taking the entire vertical space of the screen. Microsoft should have bought ModernMix if their programmers had trouble making windows work. There should have been 2 start buttons with the options to remove either. The Calendar and Weather widgets should have been built-in with options to remove. The simple looking Metro Tablet apps looks childish compared to the full blown applications. Didn't like the simple tile look of Office 2013 and that without linking a Microsoft account, you lost the dictionary and synonyms functions. If I wanted a tablet look and feel then I would buy a tablet. On a desktop or laptop, I need mouse and keyboard focused operating systems. I have many Intel quadcore computers and laptops that are not i3,i5,i7 variant and does not support Hyper-V. I need Virtual PC 2007 or Windows 7 Virtual PC compatibility. If Metro dies on the desktop, I will not shed a tear.
  • 0 Hide
    stratplaya , March 18, 2014 1:53 PM
    This is news to me. Perhaps if they actually released a version people would use it? I know I would have tried it out.
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