Mozilla has culled the Metro version of its Firefox for Windows 8 citing low adoption of platform even before the version 1 of the browser was released.
“Earlier this week, I asked our engineering leads and release managers to take the Windows Metro version of Firefox off the trains”, announced Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale. “The team is solid and did good work, but shipping a 1.0 version, given the broader context we see for the Metro platform, would be a mistake.”
Nightingale said that shipping a browser for the platform wouldn’t help the organisation achieve its mission. The Firefox VP revealed that the adoption of the platform has been pretty flat and that the non-profit should focus its attention on things that would allow it to reach a wider audience.
“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”, added Nightingale.
Without having an extensive real-world testing as in the case of version for other platforms if Firefox for Metro is released, chances are that a lot of bugs will be discovered on the field, which will require Mozilla’s QA, engineering and design team to carry out a great deal of follow-up notes Nightingale.
“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.”
Firefox for Metro was announced in February 2012, a prototype shipped in April 2012, a pre-release launch happened in October 2012 and the nightly build finally arrived in February 2013. However, since then the browser has had three canceled launches – one in December 2013, February 2014 and March 18 2014.
