Firefox 28 Released, Windows 8 Metro Excluded

We all have our Internet browser of choice, but the numbers show that Firefox is the second most dominant, second only to Chrome. This data comes from w3schools and is applicable as of January 2014. The trend, however, is the same in the past year.

It is thus no surprise that the release of Firefox 28 has been a long awaited one. Yesterday, Mozilla officially released Firefox 28, which is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. See – or NOT see – something glaringly wrong in that list?

There is no version of Firefox 28 for Windows 8 Metro!

This was not the original plan, since Windows 8 Metro was slated to have its own version of Firefox 28. At the last minute, however, Mozilla decided to pull out, the reason for which is the low popularity of Metro. Johnathan Nightingale of Mozilla says it straight out:

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.

Nightingale admits that they struggled over the decision:

We could ship it, but it means doing so without much real-world testing. 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.

Now we know which way they went. Nightingale also admits that they probably will pay for this if ever Metro takes off, but it sure looks like they are not banking on that happening.

Who’s not happy with this turn of events?

[Image via DailyTech]