Mozilla announces Firefox for Metro

Mozilla has recently announced its plans to create a new version of its Firefox browser – one that’s been totally revamped to work with the Metro interface of the upcoming Windows 8. The company launched its Firefox for Metro project this week and plans to unveil a concept version of it next quarter, and push out alpha and beta versions in the second half of 2012. Not much was revealed about the upcoming browser, but since it will be for Windows 8 Metro, it will run in full screen, focus on touch interactions and be connected to the rest of the Metro environment through Windows 8 contracts.

For those of you worried about not having Firefox on regular (classic) Windows 8, Mozilla will still be supporting it as well. This move is a necessary one for Mozilla, as its browser has had trouble being ported over to other platforms. Apple doesn’t allow browsers that don’t use its own WebKit browser engine, Meego has been abandoned by Nokia, Windows Mobile has been replaced by Windows Phone which requires a major rewrite of the whole browser, and Google recently introduced Chrome to Android, which makes it even harder to break into now (current versions of Firefox on Android aren’t “must-have” apps).

Will Firefox for Metro be a success? It’s too early to tell, but let’s hope it doesn’t follow in its predecessor’s footsteps of starting out great, and slowly deteriorating into one slow, bloated web browser.

George Wong
Categories: Web
Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, Windows 8