Mozilla stops Firefox for Windows 8 Metro browser due to low adoption

By Nicel Jane Avellana

Mar 15, 2014 08:47 AM EDT

Mozilla said it will no longer push through with the development of its Firefox for Windows 8 Metro browser, TechCrunch reported.

The company had been working on the browser for one and a half years. Mozilla's Firefox Vice President Jonathan Nightingale wrote in his official blog post that they were not able to see the active users of the Metro app reach more than 1,000 daily. Thus, they decided to halt work on the app so that they would be able to use their resources for those products that are actually getting off the ground. He cited the pre-release version of Firefox which millions of users are now testing, the report said.

The report quoted Nightingale as saying, "Mozilla builds software to make the world better, but we have to pick our battles. We're not as tiny as we were when we shipped Firefox 1.0, but we still need to focus on the projects with the most impact for our mission; the massive scale of our competitors and of the work to be done requires us to marshal our forces appropriately."

Mozilla had originally planned to roll out the stable version of Firefox for Metro last month but then postponed the launch date to the middle of this month. Apparently, the fact that only very few users actually used it made Mozilla change plans, the report said.

Right from the beginning, Firefox for Metro has had issues. For starters, when Windows 8 was still in its infancy, it was uncertain if Microsoft would permit other browsers to run in Metro. However, the software giant just prevented other browsers from using Windows RT. Mozilla introduced a nightly build of Firefox for Metro in February last year but kept on postponing various launch dates for the stable version until it finally announced that the project was going to be terminated, the report said.

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