Mozilla, creator of the famous web browser Firefox, has revealed that it will not develop a separate version compatible with Windows 8 citing lack of users. Johnathan Nightingale, vice president of Mozilla Firefox, stated several reasons for first halting and then subsequently dropping the production of Mozilla Firefox for Windows 8, the primary reason being too much investment for a little or no impact.
Because of the changes in the operating system, Mozilla would have to develop a web browser from scratch, and besides that, there are very few users to test out the many bugs, which will prop up in the final product. Nightingale explained, “When I talk about the need to pick our battles, this feels like a bad one to pick: significant investment and low impact”.
Windows 8 market share hiked in September to 8.02% and since then dropped to 6% mark in November. Windows 8.1 currently has only 3.1% of the market share. Even if the acceptance rate is slower than anticipated, more users are bound to embrace it now, as the support for Microsoft Windows XP has ended. But this decision from Mozilla came as a surprise for everybody, as the company spokesperson were quite confident about overcoming all the hurdles they were facing to develop the browser for the newly released platform.
Interestingly, where Mozilla failed to perform, Google released a browser version, which can run on the modern system provided it is set as the default browser. Yet, because of the restrictions imposed by Microsoft, Chrome now has certain issues like not being able to support hardware acceleration and inability to work in high-resolution displays.
As for now, no third party browser developer other than Microsoft can build an application for the Windows Store and are restricted from creating metro style browsers. Such browsers can only execute if they were made the default browser on x86 or x64 systems, running the flawed operating system.
Note that the development of the browser is only paused at the moment, and Mozilla will still maintain the code it wrote. In case the platform becomes popular, they will restart the work and release a compatible browser. On one hand, users are commending Microsoft to release Microsoft Office suite on Apples digital store and on the other its restricting rival companies to launch product in its own platform, which a Mozilla lawyer has described as a potential Anti-trust issue. It’s quite complicated!
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