In February, Mozilla announced its plans to develop a version of its Firefox web browser that would run on the Metro interface in Windows 8. At the time, Mozilla indicated that making a Metro version of Firefox would be much harder than making a normal desktop version, saying, "Metro is an entirely new environment and requires a new Firefox front end and system integration points."
Now Mozilla Firefox programmer Asa Dotzler has written a post on his own blog site with some more information on Mozilla"s plans for Firefox running on Windows 8 Metro. One thing that Dotzler states is that Microsoft"s own Internet Explorer 10 web browser in Metro isn"t a 100 percent Metro app. He states, "It is actually sort of a hybrid program that bridges both the Classic and Metro environments and is built using both the WinRT and win32 APIs."
Dotzler believes that third party web browsers such as Firefox should also be developed in the same way as IE 10 in Metro. He also hopes that Mozilla will be able to offer both the Metro version and the classic desktop version of Firefox as one download file where the browser would be installed for both versions of Windows 8"s user interface. He adds, "We"ll, of course, have a Metro-specific front-end that fits in with the new environment, but we will not have to deploy two completely different browsers."
As we have reported before, Mozilla hopes to have alpha and beta versions of Firefox for Windows 8 released sometime in the second half of 2012.