10 ms·

Update on Metro

238 points by KwanEsq 13y ago

devx 13y ago
Designing for Metro was a waste of time from the beginning.
velikos 13y ago
Ouch
yaur 13y ago
Seems like a good idea. I'm using windows 8.1 at work and home and the only time I use metro "apps" is when I have a file association that needs to be updated to use a desktop app.
RyanZAG 13y ago
Here's hoping more developers follow suite and Microsoft is eventually forced to drop this whole failed experiment. The changes coming to Win8.1 and the terrible sales figures as people stick to Win7 are hopefully very good indicators that this will happen - and then the rest of us can get back to actually using an OS and not fighting it.
- yuhong 13y ago
  I wouldn't drop Metro completely, but I'd offer a start menu as an option.
- yulaow 13y ago
  I would prefere to keep metro as the more "consumer friendly" ui solution and then REALLY improve the desktop so it can fight evenly with the linux ones and become really the place for us "pro" user who need to get shits done
- codeulike 13y ago
  Metro is going to work out well eventually, maybe in Windows 9. Microsoft are playing for the long term here. When you use it on a touchscreen it really makes sense, and one day all screens will be touchscreens.
  - Nursie 13y ago
    They may all get the capability but I don't believe for a second it will be the preferred input mode for workstation type activities.
  - bambax 13y ago
    Yes all screens will eventually be touch screens, but as Nursie said below, touch will probably never be the primary input medium for any productivity task. For one, it's much too slow because you have to cover the whole screen to interact with it. The mouse operates on a translation of the screen that is much smaller, making moves much faster. For two, I sit over a meter and a half from my screen and couldn't touch it without standing up.
bri3d 13y ago
Their cited use metrics seem a bit bizarre. I had absolutely no idea Firefox for Metro existed and would gladly have tried out a prerelease build if I had any idea it were available. I certainly don't disagree with the idea, though. Mozilla have limited resource and by almost all accounts the Windows tile UI isn't being adopted rapidly or willingly.
- MekaiGS 13y ago
  Err it's pretty obvious, when you click on the menu there is a giant button that says Windows 8 Mode on it.
  - bri3d 13y ago
    Two things: 1) I didn't even bother to install Firefox on my Windows 8 tablet because I didn't know about this feature; had I known, I would have. 2) http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-launch-firefox-windows-8-touch http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-launch-firefox-... seems a far cry from a "giant button" - not only do I rarely if ever use that menu (because keyboard shortcuts) but I doubt I'd have picked up on that option unless I were looking for it.
    - MekaiGS 13y ago
      It's actually much bigger in the newer nightly http://i.imgur.com/dVZl0YP.jpg http://i.imgur.com/dVZl0YP.jpg
- userbinator 13y ago
  > Mozilla have limited resource ...which they have spent a lot of on needlessly changing the UI, so at least refusing to do it this time is a welcome change in direction.
- mbrubeck 13y ago
  Hi, I'm one of the developers who built Firefox for Metro. It's true, we don't know what the usage would have been like if we did some real marketing of the Metro feature. We briefly had a "what's new" page that promoted Metro for users of Firefox Aurora on Windows 8, but we never did a similar promotion on the larger Firefox Beta channel. We had another in-product promotion planned for after the release of Firefox 28, but that's no longer in the cards. In the absence of that, we have to rely on metrics from desktop Firefox (e.g. what portion of our users are running it on the touch hardware that our Metro app was designed for) and on any data we can get about the PC industry as a whole. I'm torn about this decision (understandably, I think), and I still think that Microsoft has a good chance of eventually building a much larger user base for its touch platforms. But the improvements we wanted to make to the Metro browser (like making the scrolling as smooth as possible) would have required ongoing work not just from my team but from other groups like the graphics and layout teams, whose energy may be better used on other platforms (desktop, Android, Firefox OS). So we had to think strategically about what's right for us to ship this year.
AaronFriel 13y ago
This is an understandable decision from Firefox's perspective. Windows 8/8.1 are okay on tablets, but if the interface and implementation requires a lot of polish, they need the user base to get it there. I think one problem with Metro adoption has actually been the way one browser vendor in particular treated its users. I'm talking, of course, of Google Chrome. For a long period of time, reinstalling Chrome meant getting dropped into a hideous, single-window "Metro" implementation that offered none of the benefits of the environment, and every downside. I would prefer to use IE in full screen mode over "Chrome in Windows 8 Mode" and that's saying something. Now Google's "Windows 8 Mode" is essentially a ChromeOS implementation in Windows, which I sort of think is cool, and mostly think is just perplexing for users. I wonder why no one - Mozilla, Google, Opera - has implemented exactly what IE does. A very simple interface with not a lot of bells and whistles, an address bar, a tab picker, and a full screen browser. Maybe it's because Google Chrome doesn't seem to work well with multitouch - support seems to be based on the whims of the version number - and Mozilla's engine similarly seems to have interactivity issues. As a result, I get the feeling when using these browsers on a Surface Pro that no one at Google or Mozilla is too. For over a year, pinch to zoom and other multi-touch gestures didn't work on Chrome. Or they would on Canary or Dev, but only for a few weeks, before suddenly not working again. Pinch to zoom is abhorrent on Firefox - a clunky experience that makes me regret doing it every time. And scrolling requires two fingers on Firefox - or at least it does in Nightly now - and so for the longest time I thought it didn't work at all. I don't know why they've decided their browser is the only one that needs two fingers to scroll. Chrome works terribly on a mid to high DPI display. I can't for the life of me close a tab. The result is clunky. Users don't want clunky things. Chrome defaulting to Metro mode for Windows 8 users during a period when the browser barely or intermittently supported touch leaves me with only foul things to say to a Chrome dev or their program manager if I ever meet one. Likewise, I can't understand why Firefox is making Firefox in Metro a major project - give me a full screen interface to Gecko with a big address bar at the top or bottom and let me use that. EDIT: WHOA! Firefox Nightly's (30.x) Windows 8 mode is actually decent. Pinching to zoom doesn't inflict masochistic terrors on me, and one finger is all that's necessary to scroll. When did this happen and why doesn't someone tell people about it?
- fournm 13y ago
iriche 13y ago
The Metro mode is awesome on my Surface - but thats about it...
liminal 13y ago
I'd love to see a touch-optimized mode in their desktop browser interface to use on my touchscreen laptop.
fournm 13y ago
That's actually kind of disappointing. It was nice to use it on my underpowered laptop, and it tended to work fine. I can't imagine the intersection of "people who use Aurora" and "people who use Windows 8.1" and "people who will set their default browser to Metro mode and then use something else in desktop mode" was ever that great to begin with, though (myself and... maybe 2 others?) so I can't really say I'm surprised.
sokrates 13y ago
> 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. Cue rimshot.
polshaw 13y ago
If you don't care about touch, then frankly you won't care about this announcement. I think this is the perspective of most posters here. But as someone that wanted a better touch-optimised full-fat browser, I am very disappointed. Metro is all about touch, and the problem with Firefox in that context is that its touch performance sucks-- zoom is irresponsive and stepped, and scrolling performance is sub-par too; IE on the other hand excels at both of these-- which is why I use IE-metro in touch scenarios despite having a strong preference for Firefox normally. If Mozilla fixed these core issues (which I should note are 'solved' on their android browser, and I believe are important anyway for their desktop mode), then I think they would have had a lot more interest in using Firefox in metro mode.. which is essentially what I have always wanted when using tablet-style, but have been waiting it out until they had something usable. I think their 'marketing' has been really poor too.. I can't say I really had any idea there was a metro mode to the existing Firefox.. why didn't they try giving some kind of notification to windows8 users who had touch screens? And, personally (perhaps naively?), I just don't see that Mozilla don't have enough resources to handle this alongside existing projects, dumping it seems very short-sighted to me. Regardless, a big set back for those looking for a great full-fat browser experience with a touch-focused UI.
- banachtarski 13y ago
  You should qualify the "care about touch" phrase to be "care about touch on windows." People have been using touch browsers on ipads and iphones and androids for years now. Windows mobile and tablet market share is just astronomically small compared to everything else. If you're a metro user, I honestly feel bad for you.
  - polshaw 13y ago
    Perhaps your correction is valid, but your scoffing at windows (touch) users is very short-sighted. There is no mobile browser that lives up to the promise of a properly optimised full Firefox on windows. Frankly, I would say IE on metro is already better than any of them.
    - 13y ago
the_unknown 13y ago
Unfortunate. I use Windows 8.1 every day as my main OS on both a traditional desktop and on a Surface RT. I had no idea that Firefox had a Metro version available. And I happen to use Firefox as my main browser on my desktop. I would have loved for a notice to appear when starting it up one day to say "Hey, we see you use Windows 8 - did you know there's a Metro option available? Find out More or Never bother me again."
- mbrubeck 13y ago
  Note that browsers like Chrome and Firefox aren't allowed on Windows RT. Browsers for Windows RT can use IE's rendering and JS engine, but other existing engines won't work within the restricted "Windows Store app" environment. Windows 8 has a special exception to these restrictions. This exception is available only to the app you choose as your default web browser, to prevent other apps from using it. And it's available only on Windows 8 for x86 hardware, since Microsoft claims that's sufficient to satisfy the terms of their 2001 anti-trust settlement with the US DOJ.
rblatz 13y ago
This is disappointing, I've been looking into touch interfaces for kiosks. Currently the best option for us is using IE on Windows 8.1. OS X isn't really built for touch, and the browsing experience isn't that great on it with a touch screen. Chrome and FF in desktop mode doesn't deliver the visual cues that the pages are loading the same way IE does. Which I didn't even realize until I got my hands on it. For some reason people (read me and everyone that has tested it) feel like a response should be instant when you click a link on a giant touch screen. IE does a great job of popping up UI to communicate that it is working. Chrome just sets the tab's favicon to a spinner.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Why not just use an iPad or Android tablet (Galaxy Tab 12.2)?
  - rblatz 13y ago
    We are thinking of a much larger touch screen than a tablet.
    - moron4hire 13y ago
      There are some desktop-sized Android machines these days. The one I saw at Staples wasn't very impressive, but apparently it's possible. That said, I'm also building a touch app on Windows 8. But it's not consumer-facing, it's going out to state DOTs. I've stuck to using regular, ol' WinForms, mostly because I still find it loads easier to actually program than any of the newer shit MS has floated.
    - myko 13y ago
      These might not be quite as large as some touchscreen kiosks I've seen, but my company has sold quite a few of these to run our applications: http://www.amazon.com/ViewSonic-24-inch-Display-Monitor-Android/dp/B00DSUTG4U/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1394890827&sr=1-2&keywords=viewsonic+android+monitor http://www.amazon.com/ViewSonic-24-inch-Display-Monitor-Andr...
- deleted 13y ago
Romoku 13y ago
I've been looking to abandon Chrome and I would definitely give Metro Firefox a try on my desktop. I enjoy the metro split screen with the Windows 8 Store Twitter client (it's awesome to get push notifications). If I had a nice browser for metro then I would definitely try to migrate.
orky56 13y ago
This type of news really breaks my heart. I'm part of a team developing a Windows 8 app for Metro. On the one hand, we have faced lots of challenges (8.1 isn't compatible with 8!) and understand the issues regarding adoption. However, we still continue to believe that the Metro experience is a great concept and apps like ours have a chance to significantly turn the tide on its reputation. It's really a free-for-all where whoever creates the strongest end-user experience can really own that category on Windows 8. That brand/product recognition can follow to a user's other devices whether it phone/tablet/laptop.
- isaacwaller 13y ago
  What is your app?
  - orky56 13y ago
    Still unannounced but happy to share details privately.
- tonetheman 13y ago
  You really should look at your metrics at this point. Metro is a failure if you believe their numbers and there is no reason not to. You might be working on a cool product that like 1000 people might use. Anyway just a suggestion, no worries if it does not apply
tomp 13y ago
Meta comment: That is how titles should be on HN. Metro or Update on Metro would not tell us much, but with a short description in [brackets] it's much more relevant.
- NoodleIncident 13y ago
  Were the brackets added or endorsed by a mod, or are they just overlooking the OP not strictly following the rules? I think that the policy of sticking strictly to the article title is usually a good one, but being able to contextualize in brackets like this without mods cracking down on it would be an improvement, I think.
- rlpb 13y ago
  The title is now "Update on Metro".
  - tomp 13y ago
    It was "Metro [Mozilla decides to not ship Firefox of Metro]" or something similar...
DigitalSea 13y ago
My understanding is that we can expect Metro on desktop to be a non-existent feature in Windows 9 onwards if rumours and screenshots are to be believed. The tiled interface works brilliantly on a Surface tablet and is definitely way more user friendly than iOS' interface, however on desktop it makes no sense. I'm sure there will be few tears over this decision to cancel Firefox for Metro.
zobzu 13y ago
I command this VP for also actually saying "it dead jim" when it is - unlike the "its going to community-mode". I think its a much nicer, transparent communication from mozilla and exactly what i expect from mozilla, too. Props!
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  I assume you meant "commend"...because "command" would be a bit aggressive ;)
crag 13y ago
Windows 8 is fine if you take away Metro. First app I installed was a "Start menu" app. I use Start8 from Stardoc. I don't blame Mozilla for not supporting Metro. And just to point out, Firefox runs fine on the Windows 8 Desktop.
- runner84111 13y ago
  Well Metro is great for tablets, or even laptops if you have a decent touch-pad.. That said, I don't think every software needs to support Metro since it seems to be geared more for casual use programs.
  - crag 13y ago
    Oh of course. I didn't mean to suggest Metro wasn't great for tablets and phones. Funny, I came "this close" to buying a Windows Phone - but I didn't know anyone at the office, or personally who had one. So I stuck with the iPhone. I liked Metro (on the phone) better then iOS. I like the tiles. I wish more people would buy the damn thing. ;) And that does bring up something I've been wondering about: why aren't more people buying Windows Phone and Tablets? Is it an image problem? Or was MS just too late to the party?
    - moron4hire 13y ago
      Why does it matter to have other people share your phone purchase?
      - scholia 13y ago
        Because more users attracts more app developers....
        moron4hire 13y ago
        One person could have written all of the apps I use on Android. They aren't exactly master opuses of software.
SunboX 13y ago
So how about Firefox for Windows Phone 8?
blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago
MS should donate some money to keep dev going.
chris_wot 13y ago
Ouch. Turns out, the thing that has hurt Metro is the lack of competition. If Firefox don't think it's a threat, then they've looked at the awful market share of the platform and realized it's not something to put resources into.

Update on Metro

238 points by KwanEsq 13y ago

devx 13y ago

Designing for Metro was a waste of time from the beginning.

velikos 13y ago

Ouch

yaur 13y ago

Seems like a good idea. I'm using windows 8.1 at work and home and the only time I use metro "apps" is when I have a file association that needs to be updated to use a desktop app.

RyanZAG 13y ago

Here's hoping more developers follow suite and Microsoft is eventually forced to drop this whole failed experiment. The changes coming to Win8.1 and the terrible sales figures as people stick to Win7 are hopefully very good indicators that this will happen - and then the rest of us can get back to actually using an OS and not fighting it.

yuhong 13y ago
I wouldn't drop Metro completely, but I'd offer a start menu as an option.
yulaow 13y ago
I would prefere to keep metro as the more "consumer friendly" ui solution and then REALLY improve the desktop so it can fight evenly with the linux ones and become really the place for us "pro" user who need to get shits done
codeulike 13y ago
Metro is going to work out well eventually, maybe in Windows 9. Microsoft are playing for the long term here. When you use it on a touchscreen it really makes sense, and one day all screens will be touchscreens.
- Nursie 13y ago
  They may all get the capability but I don't believe for a second it will be the preferred input mode for workstation type activities.
- bambax 13y ago
  Yes all screens will eventually be touch screens, but as Nursie said below, touch will probably never be the primary input medium for any productivity task. For one, it's much too slow because you have to cover the whole screen to interact with it. The mouse operates on a translation of the screen that is much smaller, making moves much faster. For two, I sit over a meter and a half from my screen and couldn't touch it without standing up.

bri3d 13y ago

Their cited use metrics seem a bit bizarre. I had absolutely no idea Firefox for Metro existed and would gladly have tried out a prerelease build if I had any idea it were available. I certainly don't disagree with the idea, though. Mozilla have limited resource and by almost all accounts the Windows tile UI isn't being adopted rapidly or willingly.

MekaiGS 13y ago
Err it's pretty obvious, when you click on the menu there is a giant button that says Windows 8 Mode on it.
- bri3d 13y ago
  Two things: 1) I didn't even bother to install Firefox on my Windows 8 tablet because I didn't know about this feature; had I known, I would have. 2) http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-launch-firefox-windows-8-touch http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-launch-firefox-... seems a far cry from a "giant button" - not only do I rarely if ever use that menu (because keyboard shortcuts) but I doubt I'd have picked up on that option unless I were looking for it.
  - MekaiGS 13y ago
    It's actually much bigger in the newer nightly http://i.imgur.com/dVZl0YP.jpg http://i.imgur.com/dVZl0YP.jpg
userbinator 13y ago
> Mozilla have limited resource ...which they have spent a lot of on needlessly changing the UI, so at least refusing to do it this time is a welcome change in direction.
mbrubeck 13y ago
Hi, I'm one of the developers who built Firefox for Metro. It's true, we don't know what the usage would have been like if we did some real marketing of the Metro feature. We briefly had a "what's new" page that promoted Metro for users of Firefox Aurora on Windows 8, but we never did a similar promotion on the larger Firefox Beta channel. We had another in-product promotion planned for after the release of Firefox 28, but that's no longer in the cards. In the absence of that, we have to rely on metrics from desktop Firefox (e.g. what portion of our users are running it on the touch hardware that our Metro app was designed for) and on any data we can get about the PC industry as a whole. I'm torn about this decision (understandably, I think), and I still think that Microsoft has a good chance of eventually building a much larger user base for its touch platforms. But the improvements we wanted to make to the Metro browser (like making the scrolling as smooth as possible) would have required ongoing work not just from my team but from other groups like the graphics and layout teams, whose energy may be better used on other platforms (desktop, Android, Firefox OS). So we had to think strategically about what's right for us to ship this year.

AaronFriel 13y ago

This is an understandable decision from Firefox's perspective. Windows 8/8.1 are okay on tablets, but if the interface and implementation requires a lot of polish, they need the user base to get it there. I think one problem with Metro adoption has actually been the way one browser vendor in particular treated its users. I'm talking, of course, of Google Chrome. For a long period of time, reinstalling Chrome meant getting dropped into a hideous, single-window "Metro" implementation that offered none of the benefits of the environment, and every downside. I would prefer to use IE in full screen mode over "Chrome in Windows 8 Mode" and that's saying something. Now Google's "Windows 8 Mode" is essentially a ChromeOS implementation in Windows, which I sort of think is cool, and mostly think is just perplexing for users. I wonder why no one - Mozilla, Google, Opera - has implemented exactly what IE does. A very simple interface with not a lot of bells and whistles, an address bar, a tab picker, and a full screen browser. Maybe it's because Google Chrome doesn't seem to work well with multitouch - support seems to be based on the whims of the version number - and Mozilla's engine similarly seems to have interactivity issues. As a result, I get the feeling when using these browsers on a Surface Pro that no one at Google or Mozilla is too. For over a year, pinch to zoom and other multi-touch gestures didn't work on Chrome. Or they would on Canary or Dev, but only for a few weeks, before suddenly not working again. Pinch to zoom is abhorrent on Firefox - a clunky experience that makes me regret doing it every time. And scrolling requires two fingers on Firefox - or at least it does in Nightly now - and so for the longest time I thought it didn't work at all. I don't know why they've decided their browser is the only one that needs two fingers to scroll. Chrome works terribly on a mid to high DPI display. I can't for the life of me close a tab. The result is clunky. Users don't want clunky things. Chrome defaulting to Metro mode for Windows 8 users during a period when the browser barely or intermittently supported touch leaves me with only foul things to say to a Chrome dev or their program manager if I ever meet one. Likewise, I can't understand why Firefox is making Firefox in Metro a major project - give me a full screen interface to Gecko with a big address bar at the top or bottom and let me use that. EDIT: WHOA! Firefox Nightly's (30.x) Windows 8 mode is actually decent. Pinching to zoom doesn't inflict masochistic terrors on me, and one finger is all that's necessary to scroll. When did this happen and why doesn't someone tell people about it?

fournm 13y ago

iriche 13y ago

The Metro mode is awesome on my Surface - but thats about it...

liminal 13y ago

I'd love to see a touch-optimized mode in their desktop browser interface to use on my touchscreen laptop.

fournm 13y ago

That's actually kind of disappointing. It was nice to use it on my underpowered laptop, and it tended to work fine. I can't imagine the intersection of "people who use Aurora" and "people who use Windows 8.1" and "people who will set their default browser to Metro mode and then use something else in desktop mode" was ever that great to begin with, though (myself and... maybe 2 others?) so I can't really say I'm surprised.

sokrates 13y ago

> 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. Cue rimshot.

polshaw 13y ago

If you don't care about touch, then frankly you won't care about this announcement. I think this is the perspective of most posters here. But as someone that wanted a better touch-optimised full-fat browser, I am very disappointed. Metro is all about touch, and the problem with Firefox in that context is that its touch performance sucks-- zoom is irresponsive and stepped, and scrolling performance is sub-par too; IE on the other hand excels at both of these-- which is why I use IE-metro in touch scenarios despite having a strong preference for Firefox normally. If Mozilla fixed these core issues (which I should note are 'solved' on their android browser, and I believe are important anyway for their desktop mode), then I think they would have had a lot more interest in using Firefox in metro mode.. which is essentially what I have always wanted when using tablet-style, but have been waiting it out until they had something usable. I think their 'marketing' has been really poor too.. I can't say I really had any idea there was a metro mode to the existing Firefox.. why didn't they try giving some kind of notification to windows8 users who had touch screens? And, personally (perhaps naively?), I just don't see that Mozilla don't have enough resources to handle this alongside existing projects, dumping it seems very short-sighted to me. Regardless, a big set back for those looking for a great full-fat browser experience with a touch-focused UI.

banachtarski 13y ago
You should qualify the "care about touch" phrase to be "care about touch on windows." People have been using touch browsers on ipads and iphones and androids for years now. Windows mobile and tablet market share is just astronomically small compared to everything else. If you're a metro user, I honestly feel bad for you.
- polshaw 13y ago
  Perhaps your correction is valid, but your scoffing at windows (touch) users is very short-sighted. There is no mobile browser that lives up to the promise of a properly optimised full Firefox on windows. Frankly, I would say IE on metro is already better than any of them.
  - 13y ago

the_unknown 13y ago

Unfortunate. I use Windows 8.1 every day as my main OS on both a traditional desktop and on a Surface RT. I had no idea that Firefox had a Metro version available. And I happen to use Firefox as my main browser on my desktop. I would have loved for a notice to appear when starting it up one day to say "Hey, we see you use Windows 8 - did you know there's a Metro option available? Find out More or Never bother me again."

mbrubeck 13y ago
Note that browsers like Chrome and Firefox aren't allowed on Windows RT. Browsers for Windows RT can use IE's rendering and JS engine, but other existing engines won't work within the restricted "Windows Store app" environment. Windows 8 has a special exception to these restrictions. This exception is available only to the app you choose as your default web browser, to prevent other apps from using it. And it's available only on Windows 8 for x86 hardware, since Microsoft claims that's sufficient to satisfy the terms of their 2001 anti-trust settlement with the US DOJ.

rblatz 13y ago

This is disappointing, I've been looking into touch interfaces for kiosks. Currently the best option for us is using IE on Windows 8.1. OS X isn't really built for touch, and the browsing experience isn't that great on it with a touch screen. Chrome and FF in desktop mode doesn't deliver the visual cues that the pages are loading the same way IE does. Which I didn't even realize until I got my hands on it. For some reason people (read me and everyone that has tested it) feel like a response should be instant when you click a link on a giant touch screen. IE does a great job of popping up UI to communicate that it is working. Chrome just sets the tab's favicon to a spinner.

r00fus 13y ago
Why not just use an iPad or Android tablet (Galaxy Tab 12.2)?
- rblatz 13y ago
  We are thinking of a much larger touch screen than a tablet.
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    There are some desktop-sized Android machines these days. The one I saw at Staples wasn't very impressive, but apparently it's possible. That said, I'm also building a touch app on Windows 8. But it's not consumer-facing, it's going out to state DOTs. I've stuck to using regular, ol' WinForms, mostly because I still find it loads easier to actually program than any of the newer shit MS has floated.
  - myko 13y ago
    These might not be quite as large as some touchscreen kiosks I've seen, but my company has sold quite a few of these to run our applications: http://www.amazon.com/ViewSonic-24-inch-Display-Monitor-Android/dp/B00DSUTG4U/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1394890827&sr=1-2&keywords=viewsonic+android+monitor http://www.amazon.com/ViewSonic-24-inch-Display-Monitor-Andr...
deleted 13y ago

Romoku 13y ago

I've been looking to abandon Chrome and I would definitely give Metro Firefox a try on my desktop. I enjoy the metro split screen with the Windows 8 Store Twitter client (it's awesome to get push notifications). If I had a nice browser for metro then I would definitely try to migrate.

orky56 13y ago

This type of news really breaks my heart. I'm part of a team developing a Windows 8 app for Metro. On the one hand, we have faced lots of challenges (8.1 isn't compatible with 8!) and understand the issues regarding adoption. However, we still continue to believe that the Metro experience is a great concept and apps like ours have a chance to significantly turn the tide on its reputation. It's really a free-for-all where whoever creates the strongest end-user experience can really own that category on Windows 8. That brand/product recognition can follow to a user's other devices whether it phone/tablet/laptop.

isaacwaller 13y ago
What is your app?
- orky56 13y ago
  Still unannounced but happy to share details privately.
tonetheman 13y ago
You really should look at your metrics at this point. Metro is a failure if you believe their numbers and there is no reason not to. You might be working on a cool product that like 1000 people might use. Anyway just a suggestion, no worries if it does not apply

tomp 13y ago

Meta comment: That is how titles should be on HN. Metro or Update on Metro would not tell us much, but with a short description in [brackets] it's much more relevant.

NoodleIncident 13y ago
Were the brackets added or endorsed by a mod, or are they just overlooking the OP not strictly following the rules? I think that the policy of sticking strictly to the article title is usually a good one, but being able to contextualize in brackets like this without mods cracking down on it would be an improvement, I think.
rlpb 13y ago
The title is now "Update on Metro".
- tomp 13y ago
  It was "Metro [Mozilla decides to not ship Firefox of Metro]" or something similar...

DigitalSea 13y ago

My understanding is that we can expect Metro on desktop to be a non-existent feature in Windows 9 onwards if rumours and screenshots are to be believed. The tiled interface works brilliantly on a Surface tablet and is definitely way more user friendly than iOS' interface, however on desktop it makes no sense. I'm sure there will be few tears over this decision to cancel Firefox for Metro.

zobzu 13y ago

I command this VP for also actually saying "it dead jim" when it is - unlike the "its going to community-mode". I think its a much nicer, transparent communication from mozilla and exactly what i expect from mozilla, too. Props!

sirkneeland 13y ago
I assume you meant "commend"...because "command" would be a bit aggressive ;)

crag 13y ago

Windows 8 is fine if you take away Metro. First app I installed was a "Start menu" app. I use Start8 from Stardoc. I don't blame Mozilla for not supporting Metro. And just to point out, Firefox runs fine on the Windows 8 Desktop.

runner84111 13y ago
Well Metro is great for tablets, or even laptops if you have a decent touch-pad.. That said, I don't think every software needs to support Metro since it seems to be geared more for casual use programs.
- crag 13y ago
  Oh of course. I didn't mean to suggest Metro wasn't great for tablets and phones. Funny, I came "this close" to buying a Windows Phone - but I didn't know anyone at the office, or personally who had one. So I stuck with the iPhone. I liked Metro (on the phone) better then iOS. I like the tiles. I wish more people would buy the damn thing. ;) And that does bring up something I've been wondering about: why aren't more people buying Windows Phone and Tablets? Is it an image problem? Or was MS just too late to the party?
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    Why does it matter to have other people share your phone purchase?
    - scholia 13y ago
      Because more users attracts more app developers....
      - moron4hire 13y ago
        One person could have written all of the apps I use on Android. They aren't exactly master opuses of software.

SunboX 13y ago

So how about Firefox for Windows Phone 8?

blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago

MS should donate some money to keep dev going.

chris_wot 13y ago

Ouch. Turns out, the thing that has hurt Metro is the lack of competition. If Firefox don't think it's a threat, then they've looked at the awful market share of the platform and realized it's not something to put resources into.