Fans of the popular alternate browser on Microsoft’s PC operating platform have been waiting for months upon months for release of the final version of Metro Firefox.
Now it appears that they will have to wait until late January to get their hands on the final bits.
According to the latest reports, Mozilla has once again pushed back the release date of the Firefox browser for Windows 8 due to slow development process. This time, the estimate time of arrival is in the cold January weather — in most parts of the world, at least.
Mozilla’s recently published meeting notes state:
“The decrease in average team velocity over the two previous iterations positions Metro for a Firefox 27 release on January 21, 2014.”
There you have it, folks. The Modern UI version of the web browser was expected to leave beta on December 10 with Firefox. But as noted above, this has been pushed to late January with version 27.
The Metro version of Firefox has been in development for more than a year now.
And while nightly test builds of the browser are available for testing purposes, they are buggy, and not intended for the general public. These can be downloaded from the development branch Elm. The Aurora channels that are maintained by Mozilla currently host the Metro Preview Release.
What this means is that Internet Explorer will pretty much remain the top choice for fans of the Metro environment in Windows 8 and Windows RT.
Google, obviously, released a version of Chrome for Windows 8 at launch of the operating system, but that is nothing more than a shortcut on the Start screen that launches the desktop version of its browser in a Metro app tile.
What Firefox is aiming for here is a dedicated version — but you will have to wait for it a little more.
All Comments
That’s a good looking browser.