The development of Firefox that's being made specifically for the Modern user interface of Windows 8 reached a new level of testing today. Mozilla has now confirmed the Firefox Modern UI port is available for download from its Aurora channel, opening up the build to a new round of evaluations.
In a post on Mozilla's blog, the company stated:
Because this new version of Firefox uses the same powerful Gecko rendering engine as in Firefox desktop, there’s also support for WebGL for compelling 3D graphics and asm.js which supercharges JavaScript in the browser, allowing developers to port high performance C++ games to the Web. Hardware accelerated full HTML5 video is also supported, including open video formats like WebM and proprietary formats such as H.264.
The port also supports the touch and swipe gestures found in other Windows 8 apps, along with snapped view, Firefox Sync and Windows Share integration.
Mozilla first announced their plans to make a Modern UI port of Firefox on Windows 8 back in February 2012. A version was offered via a non-standard nightly channel in October 2012, and was later released via the standard nightly channel in February 2013.
The blog post today stated that Mozilla will now use the rest of their development time to improve the performance of the Windows 8 Modern version. Currently, the team believes they will release the final version to all Windows 8 users in late January.
Source: Mozilla | Image via Mozilla
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