Mozilla announced its intentions to develop a version of Firefox made specifically to run on Microsoft"s Metro interface for Windows 8 some time ago. Today, Firefox programmer Brian Bondy updated his blog with a new development update on Firefox for Windows 8 Metro. Bondy says that the team has made "steady progress" since his last development update three weeks ago.
Bondy says that Firefox for Windows 8 Metro now supports using the operating system"s "soft" keyboard, meaning Firefox can now be used on Windows 8-based tablet devices with their touch screen keyboards. It also now supports Windows 8"s secondary tiles feature. Bondy states:
Like Internet Explorer 10, you can pin any number of sites to your start screen. When you click on the secondary tile, it will load the pinned site in Metro whether or not Firefox is already open.
The team is also working to support Windows 8"s many touch events and gestures, along with W3C DOM touch events.
Bondy also says that the coming week will have him heading to Toronto for a Firefox work week. He states:
One of the hacking goals during this week is to get some significant initial work done on the UI for Firefox on Metro. This work will be based on the UX work from Stephen Horlander and Yuan Wang. In the initial work we"ll have the tab bar and address bar on the top and site specific options such as pin site on an app bar accessible from the bottom edge.