Mozilla Drops Firefox for Metro

Johnathan Nightingale, Vice President of Firefox at Mozilla, announced last week that they had abandoned development of the “Metro” version of Firefox. The reason he gave? The fact that no one cares about Metro. This is just one more sign that Microsoft is “barking up the wrong tree” when it comes to this particular interface design. “Metro,” or the “Modern” interface, or whatever they want to call it this week, should be shelved as a failure!

Nightingale says that in late 2012 when they started the Firefox for Metro team there was some excitement about it. It took them a while to break open Metro and get Firefox to work in that environment.

They are prepared to release Firefox version 1.0 for Metro, however, after only seeing 1,000 active daily users in the Metro environment, and considering the size of the installation of Windows at large, they basically decided that there just was no interest. They have decided to focus their efforts on the more traditional Windows environment, where there is still a lot of interest.

This should be instructive to Microsoft. If they were paying attention, and listening to their users, they to would drop the “Modern,” or “Metro,” environment in favor of a desktop that their users would actually like, and use. But, as always, Microsoft is not paying attention to it’s users, it is arrogantly trying to force it’s users to do its bidding.