Today, Mozilla programmer Brian Bondy revealed that the actual development work for Firefox on Windows 8 Metro has officially begun starting off this Monday. Brian continues by discussing some insights into what the team has already discovered while making the browser. Issue on hand is, a browser can only participate in Metro mode if it is the default browser. So if Firefox is not the default browser on a system, you can’t use it in Metro mode, a decision made by Microsoft.
He mentions that the primary goal of the development team is
Our first major goal is to get an experimental build of Fennec or Firefox running in Metro. This work is mainly being tracked in Bug 732518.
We have several smaller goals that we want to tackle next week:
- Figure out how to make our own PRI files with our own resources.
- Get a C++/XAML application working
- Get our app launching through a delegate DLL instead of an EXE
- Figure out how to interop XAML / DirectX.
- Start to figure out how we will paint content to our DirectX surface with the graphics layer
- Figure out how to implement other contracts
- Look into native theme rendering
- He concludes by saying that, it’s still early days for Firefox on Windows 8 and for faster development the team will need some constructive feedback from its users.
