Firefox for Windows 8 Metro - Front end updates, crash reporting, pdfs, and more, status update 6

Work on the Metro style enabled desktop browser has progressed steadily and things are looking really good.

We have a Q3 goal of delivering a Metro preview. This preview will include primary browser UI for navigation and tabs, and will be delivered as a combined classic + metro browser. I believe there is a Q4 goal for a beta release as well.

We made significant progress since the last update, but there is still a lot to do.

In particular we got the following working:

• Crash reporting
• pdfjs (Built in PDF viewer without the need for a plugin)
• Windowless Flash, although full screen flash doesn’t work yet
• Some accessibility hooks
• Front end event refactoring to be faster and to treat mouse input normally and distinct from touch input
• File pickers updated to be asynchronous on all platforms because it was needed for WinRT
• Front end awesomescreen work was done with results coming up as you type in the urlbar.
  
• While in metro, we also have the ‘view this page on desktop’ functionality working
• Various keyboard shortcuts added
• Various other fixes and refactoring

Add-ons will not be part of the initial release, but we will eventually be supporting Add-ons via the Add-on SDK. These initial limitations are only when in the Metro version of the browser on Windows 8.

We’ll have some kind of sync functionality to sync data between your Metro interface and your desktop interface. We’re hoping for a local, no setup sync functionality, but at worst it will be done through the current sync functionality.

We haven’t merged to mozilla-central yet, which is where Nightly builds will show up. This is mainly because we’re waiting on bug 755724 to be complete, which is to split platform and app resources up so that they can be loaded individually.