The Mozilla Foundation has stopped developing a Windows 8 “Metro” version of Firefox because of a lack of users.

“In the months since, as the team built and tested and refined the product, we’ve been watching Metro’s adoption. From what we can see, it’s pretty flat. On any given day we have, for instance, millions of people testing pre-release versions of Firefox desktop, but we’ve never seen more than 1,000 active daily users in the Metro environment,” said Jonathan Nightingale, vice-president at Mozilla, in a blog post.

That contrasts with the huge number of active users demonstrated by other versions of Firefox on other platforms according to data from analysis companies such as NetMarketShare and StatCounter, which put Firefox’s aggregate share of the global browser market at around 17.7% and 19.2% respectively, representing hundreds of millions of users for its desktop version.

The low figures come despite Microsoft announcing in February that it had sold 200m licences for Windows 8 since its launch in October 2012. The Mozilla team has only worked on a version for Intel-based systems, not the ARM-based RT devices, which have so far sold poorly.

The availability of a “Metro” version of Firefox which could be used on the tile-based Start Screen of Windows 8 to replace its built-in Internet Explorer browser does not seem to have interested users, though.

Nightingale said that he had therefore decided to halt the release of a 1.0 version, on the grounds that the organisation could not afford to devote time to projects with such small interest.

“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 [quality assurance] effort,” he said. “ 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. When I talk about the need to pick our battles, this feels like a bad one to pick: significant investment and low impact.”

He added that killing the product meant that “This opens up the risk that Metro might take off tomorrow and we’d have to scramble to catch back up, but that’s a better risk for us to take than the real costs of investment in a platform our users have shown little sign of adopting.”

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