"Metro-friendly"
aka Micky Mouse edition...
A Metro-friendly version of Firefox is finally coming to Windows 8, more than a year after Mozilla first floated the new browser. Mozilla’s Firefox planners have pegged 10 December as the release date for the first iteration of the browser to support Microsoft’s boxy, fondleable interface. Builds of Firefox 26 with unfinished …
It's completely clear, MS have said that they won't let third party apps access to the Win32 API and the WinRT API is too limited.
http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/FYI-No-JIT-on-Windows-8-for-ARM
This is why Microsoft get such a rough ride and they deserve it. They chastise Google for doing similar to this with their YouTube APIs when they've been doing this for years in various ways with this just being the latest.
"Let us have the APIs or we'll say it's all your fault, evil Google!"
"You want better API access to build a proper Firefox for ARM / RT? HAHAHA! No!"
It's not as simple as that. They are trying to steer developers in a particular direction away from writing traditional desktop applications on what is a tablet computer.
The Win32 API isn't supported on the ARM edition of Win8 RT, why would it be? there is no x86 software that is going to run on the ARM edition of Windows 8.
This was publicly known before RT shipped, so why would anyone be surprised to learn this?
They chastise Google for doing similar... when they've been doing this for years...
I think that the purpose of the operating system should be to create a framework under which any app the user chooses can run, not for the creator of the operating system to dictate which apps the user is allowed to run.
OS ≠ Orwellian System
Still no sign of the VLC for Metro that raised £47K through Kickstarter last Christmas, but at least they claim to be making progress (unlike VLC for Android, which still isn't available from the Google Play store for US users, after almost 2 years).
Are there any other big Open Source projects that are devoting resources to "Modern UI" apps? The VLC project documentation says that they had to make a number of updates to MinGW that should eventually make it easier to port other Open Source tools that use MinGW to compile Windows versions.