Mozilla abandons development of Metro Firefox for Windows 8

After two years of struggling to build a hybrid Firefox for Windows 8, Mozilla has finally thrown in the towel.

Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale made the announcement today in a post titled “Metro,” on Mozilla’s Future releases blog.

 The decision means that Firefox will continue to be developed for the Windows desktop platform without the significant burden of building an additional version that would use the same rendering engine but run in the touch-friendly but significantly more constrained Windows Store (née Metro) environment, alongside other Windows 8 native apps.

 The project had nine dedicated engineers and two product managers listed in its 29-person team roster. It took nearly a year after the first appearance of a Metro style Firefox prototype in April 2012 before the Metro code made it into the Nightly channel. Last summer, the team had declared its intention to ship the final Metro code with Firefox 26 on December 10, 2013. In January, that final date slipped to March. Today’s announcement ends all development.

According to Nightingale, the failure of Firefox Metro follows a familiar story line: overly optimistic early expectations followed by disappointing adoption rates.

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source:ZDNet