It was reported earlier this month that the release of Firefox for Windows 8 tablets has been delayed to January, 2014. Up till now the browser has been in the nightly development channel, from which it has now graduated. Mozilla today announced the launch of Firefox for Windows 8 tablets preview, it runs in Windows 8’s Metro UI mode as it has been coded from the ground up particularly for it, and is now available from the Aurora release channel.
The preview version has a tile-based Firefox Start experience, it also has support for touch and swipe gestures on Window 8 as well as Firefox Sync. Support for Snapped and Fill views is present, and so is Windows Share integration. Under the hood, there’s support for hardware accelerated HTML5 video, WebGL and asm.js, as this browser uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox desktop. Mozilla says that in the coming weeks, it will be exclusively focusing on improving performance and responsiveness. It should be kept in mind that this is a preview and even though Mozilla says that most of the features are “very nearly” complete, it is possible that testers might encounter more than a few bugs, which they can report to Mozilla for squashing.