An early version of the browser is now available in mozilla-central

Feb 13, 2013 14:24 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has recently announced that Firefox for Windows 8 with a Metro user interface had been published on mozilla-central, the company’s source code repository that provides access to Nightly builds.

The first Metro build of Mozilla Firefox was released in October, but the developers behind the project had set a deadline of March 31 for a preview version of the browser that would be capable of taking full advantage of the Metro UI.

“If you are on the Firefox Nightly channel and you have a Windows 8 device, your Wednesday Firefox update should deliver a Metro Firefox tile to the far right end of your Windows Start screen,” Asa Dotzler, Firefox desktop product manager, wrote in a blog post.

While there is no information on a potential final build of the browser aimed at Windows 8 users, Dotzler admits that there’s still a lot of work to do on this project, so the app won’t arrive sooner than mid-2013.

“There's plenty of work still to do, but it's stable enough that we're ready for more and more regular testing. If you're a Firefox or Windows developer and you'd like to get involved, please let me know,” he blogged.

The current build of the Metro Firefox doesn’t come with too many features, as it’s only supposed to help users get a glimpse at the future application on a Windows 8 computer.

The interface is rather basic, while browsing speed remains low, even though we’ve heard that it works just fine on some Windows 8 computers.

Internet Explorer 10 remains the only browser currently available on Windows 8 with Metro UI support, but both Mozilla and Google are reportedly working on special ports of their own browsers.

While Mozilla has already confirmed its own project, Google said a few months ago that no other Windows 8 apps would be released, hinting that a Chrome version with Metro support may be canceled after all.