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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 Me
by 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.
- RyJones 13y agoI work on an open-source project and we just dropped Metro/RT support for the last release, after man years of effort. The adoption didn't justify the effort. https://git.allseenalliance.org/gerrit/#/c/528/ https://git.allseenalliance.org/gerrit/#/c/528/
- bri3d 13y agoI agree with all of your points, thanks for chiming in. It just seems odd to me that the article cites Metro's adoption as "flat" based on "less than 1000" daily Metro users versus "millions" of prerelease Firefox users when the product wasn't marketed or widely available - the comparison is so unfair that that particular data feels like fluff. It sounds like the actual decision to pull the plug was made using both a critical eye on the market and much better data than the anecdote from the article would lead one to believe.
- nsxwolf 13y agoWhy do you still call it "Metro"?
- mbrubeck 13y agoWe used "Firefox for Metro" only as a code name for the project; it doesn't appear in user-facing strings in the product. We've been using that project name for a couple of years, and haven't seen a good reason to change. Microsoft hasn't settled on a useable replacement. For a while they used "Modern style" but now they've dropped that too. Now they mostly use "Windows Store app" in their developer documentation, but we found that too confusing, especially since Metro-enabled desktop browsers like Firefox and Chrome aren't necessarily installed through the Windows Store. Meanwhile, the Microsoft white paper on "Developing a Metro-enabled desktop browser" was retitled "Developing a new experience enabled desktop browser" [1], which is even less... wieldy. [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465413.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh46541...
- mantrax 13y agoBecause "the artist formerly known as Metro" was too long.
- polshaw 13y agoIt strikes me that-- if you accept that touch screens are not going away, and nor is windows-- then the work on providing smooth scrolling is unavoidable, metro or otherwise. Would there be a large amount of work on smooth scrolling for metro that would not carry over to 'desktop' windows 8 firefox?