Metro Firefox for Windows 8 Postponed to Late January 2014

News
By Jane McEntegart
published

Mozilla is blaming slow progress as the reason for the delay.

Late last month, Mozilla's Firefox planning meeting revealed that the company intended to launch a Metro UI version of its browser on December 10, 2013. In fact, the company already had Metro Firefox available in the Nightly channel and was asking Windows 8 users to help fine-tune it before its merger with the Aurora channel this week. However, it seems those hoping to see the browser go public in December will have to wait a bit longer.

PCWorld reports that the Windows 8 version of Firefox won't be available until January 2014. The publication cites Mozilla as saying slower-than-expected progress has pushed the release back by more than a month.

"The goal of the Metro Preview Release is to gather feedback and defects from the larger Aurora community," Mozilla is quoted as saying in planning meeting notes. "Whether or not the Metro Preview Release will graduate from Aurora to Beta and Release channels is still to be determined. At a minimum, it should significantly increase the number of testers and feedback."

So when can Windows 8 users expect the touch-based browser to be publicly available? According to Mozilla, the 'decrease in average team velocity' over the previous two iterations positions things for a Firefox 27 release on January 21, 2014. This would put the public release at almost two years after Mozilla first verbalized plans to build a Windows 8 version of Firefox (in March 2012).

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Jane McEntegart
10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • stevejnb
    Unfortunate, and could well be a sign of a potential indefinite hold depending on whether RT actually catches on a bit in the future. I like Explorer fine for Metro, but having another browser option would be quite nice.
    Reply
  • srap
    "Mozilla is blaming slow progress as the reason for the delay."
    And here I was thinking polar bears riding dragons were the reason of delay.
    Reply
  • qlum
    Well considering windows rt is not much of a success and its pretty stupid to use a metro browser on a laptop or desktop I think it should not have priority.
    Reply
  • Pherule
    Don't see the point in this. I'm using Firefox on Windows 8 just fine, nobody needs Firefox Metro . Firefox devs need to focus full effort into making Firefox multiprocess. They've made some progress, but there's still a long way to go.
    Reply
  • stevejnb
    11559231 said:
    Well considering windows rt is not much of a success and its pretty stupid to use a metro browser on a laptop or desktop I think it should not have priority.

    Well, simply put, for touch the Metro interface tends to be far better, and there are millions of touch enabled Windows 8/RT devices out there. On the go, Metro OS's make a lot of sense. Though it's only a small fraction of the market, and obviously it shouldn't take top priority, having SOME non-IE browser in Metro would be a good thing for a not insignificant number of users.
    Reply
  • back_by_demand
    Qlum, RT may not be a success, but 5 times as many have sold as Chromebooks in less than half the time, but I don't see people dissing Google or it's stable of software - Windows 8 is not going to go away and not having a product is commercial suicide, they need to hurry the hell up before they become more irrelevant than they already are
    Reply
  • math1337
    11560855 said:
    Qlum, RT may not be a success, but 5 times as many have sold as Chromebooks in less than half the time, but I don't see people dissing Google or it's stable of software - Windows 8 is not going to go away and not having a product is commercial suicide, they need to hurry the hell up before they become more irrelevant than they already are

    Chrome OS is pretty terribad. Google really needs to step it up and make a real flavor of linux. The thing is, Chome OS matters so little that no one even bothers dissing it.

    FF devs should worry about fixing outstanding bugs before trying to add new features. There's a problem when your bug reports can sit untouched for years until some dev decides to bother fixing the issue.
    Reply
  • g-unit1111
    11560855 said:
    Qlum, RT may not be a success, but 5 times as many have sold as Chromebooks in less than half the time, but I don't see people dissing Google or it's stable of software - Windows 8 is not going to go away and not having a product is commercial suicide, they need to hurry the hell up before they become more irrelevant than they already are

    I just got a Surface RT and it's a great device. But it would be absolutely spectacular and outsell iPad and Android devices 2:1 had Microsoft not made the cardinal mistake of locking the operating system and limiting it exclusively to ARM development. If the Surface could run x86 apps, you'd see people in Times Square camping out to get their hands on the latest RT devices.
    Reply
  • stevejnb
    11562444 said:
    11560855 said:
    Qlum, RT may not be a success, but 5 times as many have sold as Chromebooks in less than half the time, but I don't see people dissing Google or it's stable of software - Windows 8 is not going to go away and not having a product is commercial suicide, they need to hurry the hell up before they become more irrelevant than they already are

    I just got a Surface RT and it's a great device. But it would be absolutely spectacular and outsell iPad and Android devices 2:1 had Microsoft not made the cardinal mistake of locking the operating system and limiting it exclusively to ARM development. If the Surface could run x86 apps, you'd see people in Times Square camping out to get their hands on the latest RT devices.

    A Surface tablet that runs x86 applications? You mean like the Surface Pro?
    Reply
  • agnickolov
    I'd love to get this on my Surface Pro. I have the desktop Firefox browser running there and to be honest, the experience with IE is far better...
    Reply