Mozilla announced on Friday that the company was shelving the release of its Metro Firefox due to lack of interest from users for the Windows touch-based interface.
A Firefox for Windows 8's "Metro" user interface was scheduled to be released only days before its cancellation, reports Computerworld. The browser had been in the works for two years.
Firefox vice president Johnathan Nightingale took the Moxilla's blog to explain why they were shelving the touch-based browser. He wrote that interest and adoption of the Metro user interface had been "pretty flat."
Nightingale said that of the millions that are testing the new web browser, "we've never seen more than 1,000 active daily users in the Metro environment."
The lack of use, means that the browser isn't being tested enough and that if they released the browser it could be quite buggy, which would require lots "of follow-up engineering, design and QA effort."
Though currently shelved, if the adoption rate of Metro improves, then Moxilla hinted that it could possibly return to finishing off the browser and releasing it.
Metro hasn't caught on much with Windows users and even Microsoft seems ready to concede the notion as the company is preparing a Windows 8.1 Update, which would allow users to move away from the touch-based tiles that everyone usually skips past after start up.
image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
