Brain R Bondy has posted an update on the status of Firefox for Windows 8 Metro Modern User Interface. There is quite a bit of progress in getting Firefox adapted to run in this unique Windows 8 interface:
- Crash reporting
- pdfjs (Built in PDF viewer without the need for a plugin)
- Windowless Flash, although full screen flash doesn’t work yet
- Some accessibility hooks
- Front end event refactoring to be faster and to treat mouse input normally and distinct from touch input
- File pickers updated to be asynchronous on all platforms because it was needed for WinRT
- Front end awesomescreen work was done with results coming up as you type in the urlbar.
- While in metro, we also have the ‘view this page on desktop’ functionality working
- Various keyboard shortcuts added
- Various other fixes and refactoring
However, there is currently one major hiccup in regards to making a “Metro” version of Firefox, add-ons:
Add-ons will not be part of the initial release, but we will eventually be supporting Add-ons via the Add-on SDK. These initial limitations are only when in the Metro version of the browser on Windows 8.
Also, Mozilla is still trying to work on away to sync between the regular Firefox and the “Metro” versions. As far as when previews will be available, this is dependent on bug 755724 being completed.
