Update on Metro
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Metro is all about touch, and the problem with Firefox in that context is that its touch performance sucks-- zoom is irresponsive and stepped, and scrolling performance is sub-par too; IE on the other hand excels at both of these-- which is why I use IE-metro in touch scenarios despite having a strong preference for Firefox normally.
If Mozilla fixed these core issues (which I should note are 'solved' on their android browser, and I believe are important anyway for their desktop mode), then I think they would have had a lot more interest in using Firefox in metro mode.. which is essentially what I have always wanted when using tablet-style, but have been waiting it out until they had something usable. I think their 'marketing' has been really poor too.. I can't say I really had any idea there was a metro mode to the existing Firefox.. why didn't they try giving some kind of notification to windows8 users who had touch screens? And, personally (perhaps naively?), I just don't see that Mozilla don't have enough resources to handle this alongside existing projects, dumping it seems very short-sighted to me. Regardless, a big set back for those looking for a great full-fat browser experience with a touch-focused UI.
People have been using touch browsers on ipads and iphones and androids for years now. Windows mobile and tablet market share is just astronomically small compared to everything else. If you're a metro user, I honestly feel bad for you.
> Frankly, I would say IE on metro is already better than any of them.
Care to qualify this? Chrome on ios for example is fantastic.
I certainly don't disagree with the idea, though. Mozilla have limited resource and by almost all accounts the Windows tile UI isn't being adopted rapidly or willingly.
1) I didn't even bother to install Firefox on my Windows 8 tablet because I didn't know about this feature; had I known, I would have.
2) http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-launch-firefox-... seems a far cry from a "giant button" - not only do I rarely if ever use that menu (because keyboard shortcuts) but I doubt I'd have picked up on that option unless I were looking for it.
...which they have spent a lot of on needlessly changing the UI, so at least refusing to do it this time is a welcome change in direction.
It's true, we don't know what the usage would have been like if we did some real marketing of the Metro feature. We briefly had a "what's new" page that promoted Metro for users of Firefox Aurora on Windows 8, but we never did a similar promotion on the larger Firefox Beta channel. We had another in-product promotion planned for after the release of Firefox 28, but that's no longer in the cards.
In the absence of that, we have to rely on metrics from desktop Firefox (e.g. what portion of our users are running it on the touch hardware that our Metro app was designed for) and on any data we can get about the PC industry as a whole.
I'm torn about this decision (understandably, I think), and I still think that Microsoft has a good chance of eventually building a much larger user base for its touch platforms. But the improvements we wanted to make to the Metro browser (like making the scrolling as smooth as possible) would have required ongoing work not just from my team but from other groups like the graphics and layout teams, whose energy may be better used on other platforms (desktop, Android, Firefox OS). So we had to think strategically about what's right for us to ship this year.
It just seems odd to me that the article cites Metro's adoption as "flat" based on "less than 1000" daily Metro users versus "millions" of prerelease Firefox users when the product wasn't marketed or widely available - the comparison is so unfair that that particular data feels like fluff.
It sounds like the actual decision to pull the plug was made using both a critical eye on the market and much better data than the anecdote from the article would lead one to believe.
We've been using that project name for a couple of years, and haven't seen a good reason to change. Microsoft hasn't settled on a useable replacement. For a while they used "Modern style" but now they've dropped that too. Now they mostly use "Windows Store app" in their developer documentation, but we found that too confusing, especially since Metro-enabled desktop browsers like Firefox and Chrome aren't necessarily installed through the Windows Store. Meanwhile, the Microsoft white paper on "Developing a Metro-enabled desktop browser" was retitled "Developing a new experience enabled desktop browser" [1], which is even less... wieldy.
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh46541...
Wait. You have to install the desktop version to get it to work in Metro? What? No, don't make me do that. No wonder no-one used it.
Second, some details about the store... "Windows Store apps" can use the IE rendering engine to browse the web, but can't use other existing libraries like Gecko or Blink. "Metro-enabled desktop browsers" like Firefox and Chrome and IE (the terminology comes from an old Microsoft white paper [1]) can take advantage of a special exception to the restrictions placed on most "Metro" apps, but only if they are set as the default browser for both desktop and Metro mode. And they can't be installed like Windows Store apps; you have to install them through the desktop.
Metro-enabled desktop browsers (like other desktop apps) can be listed in the Windows Store, but can't be installed there. Instead, the Windows Store page will just contain a link an installer on the developer's web site. Chrome links to their installer from the Windows Store, and we'd have done the same if we shipped the Metro app in a Firefox release. (We could still list desktop Firefox in the Windows Store, subject to the same restrictions.)
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/firefox-for-windows-8-adds-a-touch-of-m...
I don't understand why it is legal for Microsoft (AND Apple) to do this! How is this different from what Microsoft did with IE vs Netscape? Why doesn't this violate anti-trust or competition laws?
It doesn't violate anti-trust laws because you have a very viable option of using Android or any other tablet OS.
The restriction against using browser engines other than IE's Trident applies to "Windows Store Apps" for desktop, too.
Mozilla and Google managed to claw out a half-hearted concession for the browsers themselves on the desktop (though not RT), but even then the other restrictions that mbrubeck noted still apply: the browser needs to be installed outside the Windows Store and only the default browser is allowed to present a touch interface. I'm not sure what purpose is behind the latter restriction, other than making switching or experimenting with browsers slightly more of a hassle.
I can't imagine the intersection of "people who use Aurora" and "people who use Windows 8.1" and "people who will set their default browser to Metro mode and then use something else in desktop mode" was ever that great to begin with, though (myself and... maybe 2 others?) so I can't really say I'm surprised.
I think one problem with Metro adoption has actually been the way one browser vendor in particular treated its users. I'm talking, of course, of Google Chrome. For a long period of time, reinstalling Chrome meant getting dropped into a hideous, single-window "Metro" implementation that offered none of the benefits of the environment, and every downside. I would prefer to use IE in full screen mode over "Chrome in Windows 8 Mode" and that's saying something.
Now Google's "Windows 8 Mode" is essentially a ChromeOS implementation in Windows, which I sort of think is cool, and mostly think is just perplexing for users.
I wonder why no one - Mozilla, Google, Opera - has implemented exactly what IE does. A very simple interface with not a lot of bells and whistles, an address bar, a tab picker, and a full screen browser. Maybe it's because Google Chrome doesn't seem to work well with multitouch - support seems to be based on the whims of the version number - and Mozilla's engine similarly seems to have interactivity issues.
As a result, I get the feeling when using these browsers on a Surface Pro that no one at Google or Mozilla is too. For over a year, pinch to zoom and other multi-touch gestures didn't work on Chrome. Or they would on Canary or Dev, but only for a few weeks, before suddenly not working again. Pinch to zoom is abhorrent on Firefox - a clunky experience that makes me regret doing it every time. And scrolling requires two fingers on Firefox - or at least it does in Nightly now - and so for the longest time I thought it didn't work at all. I don't know why they've decided their browser is the only one that needs two fingers to scroll. Chrome works terribly on a mid to high DPI display. I can't for the life of me close a tab.
The result is clunky. Users don't want clunky things. Chrome defaulting to Metro mode for Windows 8 users during a period when the browser barely or intermittently supported touch leaves me with only foul things to say to a Chrome dev or their program manager if I ever meet one. Likewise, I can't understand why Firefox is making Firefox in Metro a major project - give me a full screen interface to Gecko with a big address bar at the top or bottom and let me use that.
EDIT: WHOA! Firefox Nightly's (30.x) Windows 8 mode is actually decent. Pinching to zoom doesn't inflict masochistic terrors on me, and one finger is all that's necessary to scroll. When did this happen and why doesn't someone tell people about it?
However, this meant adding entire new input/graphics/widget backends to the Gecko platform using a combination of WinRT and Win32 APIs, and a long slog to get those stable and responsive enough to ship to millions of users. And designing and build a new UI (even a minimal one) means we don't get existing desktop Firefox features "for free" -- stuff like private browsing, add-ons, bookmarking, password management, sync...
Even minimal browsers have a surprisingly large surface area if you want them to be usable for daily browsing. We cut out a lot of that stuff for the first release, but that also means we had a long road ahead toward a feature set that was competitive with other browsers (including desktop Firefox, or Firefox for Android). And that's not even getting into technical issues with the Metro environment, like the inability to run the NPAPI version of Flash Player...
Just as one example: When writing a browser, you need to do your own text rendering and layout. That means you can't rely on the OS to handle things like select/copy/paste. So you end up implementing your own touch-friendly selection UI, and making it match the OS behavior as much as possible. This turns out to be a minefield of subtleties and edge cases.
Is it possible that the reason you're seeing low use is because users aren't aware the option exists? Also, why are features in Firefox Metro not ported to Desktop? Touch zoom and scroll for example, are vastly superior in Windows 8 Mode right now.
1. Low percentage of Windows 8/8.1 users among Firefox testers
2. Low percentage of Windows 8/8.1 users among Firefox developers
3. Low usage of the Windows Metro/Modern UI (I don't know anyone that uses it on a desktop or laptop besides playing solitaire)
4. Low adoption of Windows RT tablets/convertibles (these are the ones that are forced to use a Metro/Modern browser)
I'm fine with Mozilla focusing on Firefox for Desktop and Android. I'm a big user of both.
As noted in the linked blog post:
> At first, it looked like we would be locked out completely. We eventually broke open Metro (though never the RT line of ARM-based products) and we got to work.
- iOS forbids JIT just like Windows, making it no worse than Windows.
- iOS 7 made JavaScriptCore public API so all iOS apps may use JavaScript.
- Pre-iOS 7, companies were already embedding SpiderMonkey and their own forks of JavaScriptCore in iOS apps. This is allowed as long as JIT is off.
Firefox for Metro has been a testbed for graphics/scrolling/touch technology that we want to eventually land in Firefox for desktop. Things like off-main-thread compositing were enabled in Windows Metro before Windows desktop because (a) responsive scrolling and zooming is more critical in a browser designed for touch, and (b) supporting it just in the new Windows 8 environment requires less development and testing than supporting it across all the desktop OS versions where Firefox runs (and integrating it into existing graphics and input code for those platforms). But it should all make its way into the desktop version eventually.
As a Windows 8.1 user who didn't know this option exists, I feel like it might be.
I think that the policy of sticking strictly to the article title is usually a good one, but being able to contextualize in brackets like this without mods cracking down on it would be an improvement, I think.
I would have loved for a notice to appear when starting it up one day to say "Hey, we see you use Windows 8 - did you know there's a Metro option available? Find out More or Never bother me again."
Windows 8 has a special exception to these restrictions. This exception is available only to the app you choose as your default web browser, to prevent other apps from using it. And it's available only on Windows 8 for x86 hardware, since Microsoft claims that's sufficient to satisfy the terms of their 2001 anti-trust settlement with the US DOJ.
OS X isn't really built for touch, and the browsing experience isn't that great on it with a touch screen.
Chrome and FF in desktop mode doesn't deliver the visual cues that the pages are loading the same way IE does. Which I didn't even realize until I got my hands on it. For some reason people (read me and everyone that has tested it) feel like a response should be instant when you click a link on a giant touch screen. IE does a great job of popping up UI to communicate that it is working. Chrome just sets the tab's favicon to a spinner.
That said, I'm also building a touch app on Windows 8. But it's not consumer-facing, it's going out to state DOTs. I've stuck to using regular, ol' WinForms, mostly because I still find it loads easier to actually program than any of the newer shit MS has floated.
http://www.amazon.com/ViewSonic-24-inch-Display-Monitor-Andr...
For one, it's much too slow because you have to cover the whole screen to interact with it. The mouse operates on a translation of the screen that is much smaller, making moves much faster.
For two, I sit over a meter and a half from my screen and couldn't touch it without standing up.
Cue rimshot.
I'm sure there will be few tears over this decision to cancel Firefox for Metro.
I don't blame Mozilla for not supporting Metro. And just to point out, Firefox runs fine on the Windows 8 Desktop.
I liked Metro (on the phone) better then iOS. I like the tiles. I wish more people would buy the damn thing. ;)
And that does bring up something I've been wondering about: why aren't more people buying Windows Phone and Tablets? Is it an image problem? Or was MS just too late to the party?