Folks at Mozilla seem really geared up for creating a metro-styled Firefox for Windows 8. And daunting as it did sound at first, the fellows are making leaps and bounds and are all set to meet the deadlines and accomplish milestones. Earlier, the Firefox team had stated that they would achieve the working prototype milestone during the second quarter of 2012. Now according to the project head, Brian Bondy, they have!
Brian posted about this achievement on his personal blog. According to him, his team has ‘a working browser in Metro’ which essentially is a Metro prototype for Windows 8.
Brian wrote in his blog entry that though the look and feel of the browser currently looks like the Android version of Firefox, it is so much better, ‘Our prototype in its current form is based on the Fennec XUL code. We used to use Fennec XUL on Android, but changed to a Native UI on Android for start up performance reasons. We haven’t seen the same types of start up performance problems we’ve had on Android yet, even on VMs.’
Brian also posted a number of screenshots to show exactly how did the working prototype of the browser looks. The team has plans of creating an installer soon for the Metro prototype so as to gain feedback from devs seek.
The interesting thing about the blog entry is that Brian quite frankly admits, towards the closing of his post, that making Firefox a success with Windows 8 is extremely important for the Mozilla team. This is, he says, because Windows is the dominant OS with the most significant market effect. And Firefox definitely wouldn’t want to lose on that one.
[ttjad keyword=”windows-tablet”]
