Not enough testers using the new UI claimed to be the reason
Mozilla recently released their beta version of the Firefox for Windows 8 last month, but has scrapped the rest of the work on the final version. Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox, confirmed this on the Mozilla blog yesterday. The main reason cited behind this scrapping of project is that there aren’t many testers using the new user interface. This is the primary reason by Mozilla as the lack of feedback could lead to a buggy release, and it would require too much work thereafter. Nightingale said, “On any given day we have, for instance, millions of people testing pre-release versions of Firefox desktop, but we’ve never seen more than 1000 active daily users in the Metro environment.”
“This leaves us with a hard choice. We could ship it, but it means doing so without much real-world testing. That’s going to mean lots of bugs discovered in the field, requiring a lot of follow-up engineering, design, and QA effort. To ship it without doing that follow-up work is not an option. If we release a product, we maintain it through end of life. When I talk about the need to pick our battles, this feels like a bad one to pick: significant investment and low impact,” he added.
For now, if users worldwide need a touch-friendly browser replacement for IE, then they could stick to Chrome.
