Although Mozilla has previously offered a pre-release version of the Metro version of Firefox for Windows 8 devices, the Mozilla team now says that it “would be a mistake” to keep up with the development due to the lack of interest from users.
According to statistics from Mozilla’s servers, the usage of the beta version of Firefox for Windows 8 never passed the 1,000 users, which is totally different when they see millions of users testing the desktop version of Firefox — that is of course, counting every platform the browser supports, including Windows, OS X, and Linux.
The development started back in 2012 to build a Metro-style version of Firefox. Mozilla began by building Firefox based on the x86 architecture; however, because of Microsoft policy, the open source platform never created a Firefox for Windows RT which is based on ARM chips. So we’ll never know how many users would picked Firefox over Internet Explorer in this platform.
“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.” — Johnathan Nightingale vice president of Firefox sates.
Mozilla stopping and leaving Windows 8 without a Metro-style version of Firefox isn’t definite. The company says that it will consider resume the project when the Windows 8 Metro takes off, but for now don’t expect anything else to be released.
Source Mozilla
