Earlier this year, Mozilla announced its plans to release a version of its Firefox web browser that would be made specifically for the Metro UI in Windows 8. It been several weeks since there has been any development updates on Firefox for Windows 8 Metro, but one of the programmers on the project, Brian Bondy, has now offered up a new development update.
In a post on his blog, Bondy states:
We determined that sharing the same Firefox profile in both Desktop and Metro is out of scope for the initial version, so instead we plan to sync the settings between 2 profiles using Firefox Sync augmented with some key local events to force a sync right away by using Windows Messages, events, and the registry.
The post also says that the Firefox team has "more or less" completed its work on the appbar control and has improved a lot of the Windows 8 contracts features, with Bondy stating, "Fixed soft keyboard issues, improved gesture input support, fixed support for invoking external applications, and more."
The team has also completed work on combining the regular Windows 8 and Metro Windows 8 Firefox executable files into one, with Bondy stating, " ... now there's only one shared exe that dynamically determines which front-end to use."
Bondy doesn't give an update on when the first public version of Firefox for Windows 8 Metro will be released. Mozilla has previously announced that public alpha and beta versions of the browser should be released sometime in the second half of 2012.
Source: Brian Bondy's blog
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