Mozilla Posts First Firefox Metro Screenshots

Given the success of Windows 7 with an initial October release date, it is unlikely that Microsoft will risk missing the Christmas shopping season as it did with Vista. It does not take much more than common sense to predict that Windows 8 will be released so Microsoft can take advantage of the busiest buying season of the year and hardware makers will be in tow to make sure there are enough hardware reasons to give Windows 8 the necessary support to get off the ground quickly. Software makers are making progress as well. Among the most notable ones: Mozilla.

Reading Brian Bondy’s blog, you could easily get the impression that Firefox Metro is already late. Q2 was the initial goal, but he says there is a ton of work left to do. The current release tracker points to a Firefox 14 release, which would be on or around July 17 (if you get confused about the speedy increase of version numbers, consider the fact that Google’s Chrome Nightly versions just hit version number 20.) If we expect Windows 8 to surface in the October time frame, Mozilla is on schedule and may even have time to work on possible bugs.

Bondy has posted some screenshots of the initial Firefox Metro builds, but there isn’t much to see yet. All we can conclude at this point is that there appears to be a working version with core functionality. What we also know is that the UI is more than likely to change as well as the browser does not yet incorporate Metro UI and Firefox UI guidelines.

The most interesting part is that Firefox Metro was not built using the current desktop Firefox version, but the Fennec XUL platform that is used for Firefox Mobile. The software cores of Firefox Mobile and desktop Firefox are pretty much the same, but Firefox Mobile recently transitioned to a native UI and replaced XUL to improve its startup performance. Bondy noted that the Metro XUL build does not exhibit the same problems as it does on Android and there may be some discussion whether there is a an urgent need to move the Metro build to the native UI or not. If the decision is made to use the native UI, Firefox Metro may be, in fact, delayed.

However, the user is unlikely to see any significant benefit from such a move at this time, but simply realize that Firefox Metro could look like and work like a grown-up version of Firefox Mobile for tablets – which makes sense as Metro caters to touch use and the tablet UI of Firefox has been working particularly well in such an environment. That said, we still have doubt that touch will work on a vertical screen as well as Microsoft predicts.

Wolfgang Gruener in Products on April 02