A couple of weeks ago, Mozilla programmer Brian Bondy revealed that the actual development work for Firefox on Windows 8 Metro had officially begun. This week, Bondy gave an update on its progress on his blog site. He states:
We"re now past the hardly documented parts of development we were fighting with last week, and things are really starting to heat up. From here, most WinRT development topics should be nicely documented because they are now similar to any work done in a C++ Metro application.
Bondy also gives some tidbits of what kinds of programming the team is coming up with for Windows 8 Metro. For example, he states that the browser will have an XAML window but the team will also use DirectX "to paint to it taking up the entire area of the screen." This would seem to be an example of combining both XAML and DirectX for a Metro style user interface, something which Microsoft itself talked about in a recent Windows 8 app blog post.
Bondy also said he has got the "snap" feature working with Firefox for Windows 8, meaning you can run the browser while still running and using another Metro app to the side of Firefox.
Bondy also wanted to assure Firefox users that this won"t be a simple port of the browser to Windows 8, saying:
Firefox on Metro will not simply be Firefox desktop copied into the Metro environment, we are embracing the framework instead of fighting it.