Mozilla has announced plans to integrate its Firefox web browser with Metro for Windows 8 – including Gecko. “Windows 8 contains two application environments, ‘Classic’ and ‘Metro’. Classic is very similar to the Windows 7 environment at this time, it requires a simple evolution of the current Firefox Windows product. Metro is an entirely new environment and requires a new Firefox front end and system integration points. The feature goal here is a new Gecko based browser built for and integrated with the Metro environment. Firefox on Metro, like all other Metro apps will be full screen, focused on touch interactions, and connected to the rest of the Metro environment through Windows 8 contracts.” I haven’t checked – does Microsoft allow different rendering engines?
Microsoft has no restrictions on applications that duplicate built-in functionality for Windows nor Windows Phone.
If that’s the case, where’s Opera Mobile for WP7?
There are no native apps for WP7. Opera didn’t feel like rewriting its browser in a .NET language.
Right, the native code support in WinRT is changing the picture quite significantly for porting efforts. Extremely portable pieces of software like Firefox and Opera will still take a lot of effort (just a thing like the lack of complete file system support), but it is clearly doable and more or less a no-brainer to port to an operating system that is certain to be one of the main players in the future.
Be interesting to see what happens if Firefox Metro adds support for using plugins.
They would probably need a new plugin model that is itself suited for WinRT though, since the APIs and application lifecycle models are so different (and NPAPI/ActiveX/whatever plugins of today are really very general applications with some added hooks). Once that is in place though there is no real reason not to have plugins.
Depends on the particular plugin. Several Firefox plugins, in particular those that don’t need to go outside of the browser environment, are simply written in Javascript. I would imagine that keeping support for these wouldn’t be difficult.