On Wednesday, Mozilla quietly launched the
first public version of its Firefox web browser made especially for the desktop and 'Modern UI' versions of Windows 8. Today, one of the programmers of the browser, Brian Bondy, offered up some information on what people can expect from this first public build.
In a
post on his personal blog, Bondy says, "Desktop Firefox is responsible for applying the updates for both the Desktop and Metro front ends currently. You may encounter an update error where updates will fail to apply if both of your Desktop and Metro browsers are open at the same time. This will be resolved at some point in a future update."
The blog has a massive bullet list of features that users can expect in this first preview build. They include a new touch-optimized launch screen with tiles, gesture support, support for Windows 8-based Snap and filled states, an in-content PDF viewer and more.
Bondy also confirms that this first version does not support Flash or plug-ins, but they will be enabled in future versions. He adds, "Panning and zooming support is currently disabled. Scrolling with the mouse wheel is broken at the moment as well. You will have to use your keyboard for scrolling, or use touch. Minimum system requirements are the same as Windows 8 except that DirectX 9 is not supported yet."
