Mozilla today announced it is abandoning the Metro version of its Firefox browser, before the first release for Windows 8 even sees the light of day. Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale ordered the company’s engineering leads and release managers to halt development earlier this week, saying that shipping a 1.0 version “would be a mistake.”
After two years of struggling to build a hybrid Firefox for Windows 8, Mozilla has finally thrown in the towel. Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale made the announcement today in a post titled “Metro,” on Mozilla’s Future releases blog. The decision means that Firefox will continue to be developed for the Windows desktop platform without the significant burden of building an additional version that would use the same rendering engine but run in the touch-friendly but significantly more constrained Windows Store (née Metro) environment, alongside other Windows 8 native apps.