Firefox for Windows 8 development stopped

The developers of Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation, has announced it has stopped the development of Firefox for Windows 8. The reason given is a lack of users, especially due to a low adoption of the Metro interface.

FirefoxforWindows8

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The VP of Firefox, Johnathan Nightingale has posted on the Mozilla blog,  "In the months since, as the team built and tested and refined the product, we’ve been watching Metro’s adoption. From what we can see, it’s pretty flat. 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."

Due to the fact the software has not been thoroughly tested the developers are afraid they can't ship a quality browser. Nightingale writes,  "That’s going to mean lots of bugs discovered in the field, requiring a lot of follow up engineering, design, and QA effort. 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. When I talk about the need to pick our battles, this feels like a bad one to pick: significant investment and low impact."

He added that not releasing Firefox for Metro product meant that "This opens up the risk that Metro might take off tomorrow and we’d have to scramble to catch back up, but that’s a better risk for us to take than the real costs of investment in a platform our users have shown little sign of adopting."

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