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In March 2012, Mozilla announced that it was developing a version of Firefox for Windows 8′s Metro UI. The non-profit included Firefox for Metro in its Nightly distribution starting February of last year. In case you became partial to Mozilla’s touch friendly Firefox in that point, you’ll intend to make your peace now.

Mozilla announced this morning that development of the Metro version of Firefox has ceased. Actually, the non-profit says that to release a version 1.0 of Firefox Metro “would be a mistake.”

So, why kill of the Metro version of Firefox? Two reasons – resources and adoption rates. The 1st is probably crucial as Mozilla notes that its resources don’t seem to be infinite. It has to target what works to compete in a market against juggernauts like Google. That’s why it desires to refocus its teams at the versions of Firefox which could take advantage of difference.

As for adoption rates, Mozilla notes that it’s been “pretty flat.” In a comparison, it says that pre-release versions of Firefox desktop is being tested by millions of users whereas Firefox Metro has “never seen greater than 1,000 active daily users.” With so few users, any release would be afflicted by bugs that were never discovered throughout the alpha and beta. To circumvent that, Mozilla must devote its own resources towards QA, and the non-profit doesn’t think it’d be worth it.

Despite all this, Mozilla won’t erase Firefox Metro’s existence from the net. It should keep the code alive for anybody who desires to poke around. Even Mozilla admits that Firefox Metro could someday take off and it’ll “scramble to catch back up” if that occurs. It just feels that it’s safer to target other products for now rather than one which hasn’t ever shown much promise.

Image via paulrouget/imgur

Mozilla Ends Firefox Metro Development 4 hours ago