Metro-Enabled Firefox Expected Soon After Two Years of Work

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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After two years of steady work and a handful of Alphas and Betas, Mozilla finally appears ready to introduce its long overdue Metro-enabled browser for Windows 8/8.1 on February 4th.

Because this new version of Firefox uses the same powerful Gecko rendering engine as in Firefox desktop, there’s also support for WebGL for compelling 3D graphics and asm.js which supercharges JavaScript in the browser, allowing developers to port high performance C++ games to the Web.
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It's about time that Metro users get more browsers that appear as tiles on the start screen! Making a tile with an icon in it yourself is super hard, after all. This just underscores how important it is to have an array of awful, broken choices when it comes to web browsers that support the most unimportant aspects of Microsoft's most polarizing interface change to date. I also look forward to having to uncheck more browser install checkboxes with pieces of software I download from the Internet and hope this change increases the number of them drastically.
 
On my Surface Pro, I have tried all four browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE desktop, IE Metro).

I want to use Chrome and Firefox, but I just keep going back to IE Metro and IE desktop if the Metro version does not produce what I want.
I rarely use Firefox on my tablet now. In fact I was debating on uninstalling it. I only use Chrome when I am using my Chromecast hooked up to my TV in my bedroom.
My only complaint with the two Internet Explorers is that there are two Internet Explorers. I wish that the Metro version would display the same amount as the desktop version.
 
Aren't metro browsers still win32, since winRT is too limited to support a browser so it uses win32 with a metro UI instead?
 
Skripka said:
It took them 2 years?????
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The first year was dealing with the limitations that Microsoft placed on browsers until they relaxed some of them, and the second is actually getting a good UI and porting things like WebGL and other accelerated parts ported. They could have went the chrome way and basically just make the Modern version a forced full screen version but that version is crap and kind of unstable and not really usable in Modern. They've since gone back and decided to use it as a way to port ChromeOS over to Windows. It's probably is going to take some time to get that right too.
 
cocheese256 said:
On my Surface Pro, I have tried all four browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE desktop, IE Metro).
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^
This

Surface Pro is a killer device, it really is - but when using the touch UI, you REALLY want to be in 'Metro' mode vs the desktop. Simple gestures like swiping forward or backward to move the page forward and backward are EXTREMELY nice to have.

Being stuck on IE...I mean, it's not the end of the world. IE11 is a decent browser, for sure. But I'd definitely appreciate some extra options in the Metro UI - so this is great news!
 
Dont kid yourselves it will still just be a shell/wrapper for win32 Firefox with Metro tiles for bookmarks. Its taking so long because as Ryokurin said Microsoft tied hands of third party developers with severe restrictions that their own internal Microsoft developers dont have to abide by, then finally relented and made some small concessions for Chrome and Firefox only but no one else.

Go read the dev blog for Firefox to understand better what a clusterf*ck its been getting this Metro-fied Firefox to happen. And anyone with an RT tablet assuming theyll be running Firefox on their tablets - nope.
 
Is this more than whats been in the nightly builds forever? I hope so the nightly builds still feel very alpha...

Chrome's metro mode isn't much better though. It's interactions with the OSK stuck and last I checked there wasn't even a button to toggle it on/off (without clicking a text field). It also didn't let you scroll down in the visible section of the screen while the OSK was up.
 
dderidex said:
^
This

Surface Pro is a killer device, it really is - but when using the touch UI, you REALLY want to be in 'Metro' mode vs the desktop. Simple gestures like swiping forward or backward to move the page forward and backward are EXTREMELY nice to have.

Being stuck on IE...I mean, it's not the end of the world. IE11 is a decent browser, for sure. But I'd definitely appreciate some extra options in the Metro UI - so this is great news!
Click to expand...

Writing a combination desktop and modern browser regardless doesn't look to be easy. Even with Windows 7 it was possible to add decent touch support to desktop browsers and no one but Microsoft bothered, though Opera did offer Opera Mini for Windows 7.
 
Firefox's interface is highly non-standard and relies on a proprietary markup language and has some really weird library requirements. People often forget that Firefox is build on top of Netscape 6, which was released 13 years ago and has a lot of legacy cruft that needs to be ported or replaced.

I'm hoping it ships with the same UI as the version for Android, it's pretty good for a touch browser. Chrome's WinRT version runs the desktop UI and isn't very usable.
 
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