14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox Metro (the “modern UI” part of the browser for Windows 8) has received little attention in the news lately, but Mozilla is hard at work with it. Today (no joke, I promise), the fifth stage of development has started – and it should last until on April 12.
The current development of Firefox Metro has reached 65% and is slightly ahead of schedule, but there are plenty of bugs to deal with before exiting this early state.
Most of the issues have already been assigned, and four of them even received a fix, leaving the team a total of 24 problems to mend in this stage.
Despite identifying the problems, the correct functioning of some components depends on multiple bugs that are to be dealt with in future iterations of Firefox Metro.
Although development of Firefox Metro began a little over a year ago, actual testing of the new breed was announced by Asa Dotzler, Firefox Desktop product manager, at the beginning of October 2012.
A new iteration emerges every two weeks, which makes for a faster release cycle than for the mobile and desktop versions of Firefox.
According to a Mozilla representative, Firefox has hundreds of millions of users that form a market share of more than 20% since August last year (and results from StatCounter confirm this). Furthermore, Mozilla informed us that the Android version enjoys daily downloads topping 100,000 and a constant rating of 4.5 in Google Play store.
The modern UI part of the browser can be tested by installing the nightly build of Firefox on a Windows 8 computer. However, plenty of problems are likely to occur, since this is just a test revision.
Download Firefox for Windows (read our review for Firefox 19)
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credit for Firefox Metro icon goes to dakirby309