Firefox Lead Now Working For Google

zmarties writes "In a very low key announcement on his blog, Ben Goodger, lead developer for Firefox, has announce that effective from a couple of weeks ago, he has become a Google employee. In practice his day to day job won't change that much, in that he will still lead Firefox through its forthcoming releases, but with Google paying his wages, we can be sure that new and interesting overlap between the Mozilla Foundation's browsers and Google's services are sure to develop."

Comments

Re:Google Toolbar for Firefox

[anz2007]

Google toolbar like... https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/morei nfo.php?application=firefox&version=0.9&os=Windows &category=Search%20Tools&numpg=10&id=33

Re:Google Toolbar for Firefox

[sepluv]

Now if Firefox had a version of the Google toolbar, which up to now it does not, I would switch in a hot minute.

*Troll Alert*

Firefox has always (since 0.1) had a Google Toolbar extension--not that find you need it as its built-in search functionality is so good.

Re:I was just thinking...

[FrYGuY101]

You may be kidding, but Google registered gbrowser.com/org/net for a reason...

Re:Google Toolbar for Firefox

[jsprat]

I think you mean Hanlon's razor:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Not the End of the World (tm)

[Codeala]

Ben Goodger is "just" the lead developer, not to take anything from his contributions to the Firefox project, but the project will go on even when he work for another employer or "turn evil" as some seems to think.

The open source model is not a dictatorship, especially on a large project like mozilla/firefox, not one single person has complete control over everything.
The news of Mr Goodger change of employer is no more shocking than programmers from different countries/companies contribute code to various open source projects. There is no "hidden agenda" or "conflict of interest".

Anyone that has concern about this, become a developer: http://www.mozilla.org/developer/

Re:Corruption of FireFox Development?

[sepluv]

Please...more conspiracy theorys...

I doubt that Time-Warner would allows its employees, on company time

Well, that is why TW has a bad name and Google is kown as an ethical company. Google actually allow their employees a proportion of their work time to do their own projects. Anyway, the non-profit for-the-public-good MF is in charge of Firefox and it can always be forked if they go bad (except for the negligble proprietary components of Firefox).

So, if you enter a faulty URL, then suddenly, the Google web page appears and presents you with alternative Web links?

ATM if you enter a word or phrase that doesn't look like a URI it searches Google and takes you to the page at the top of the Google results. Personally I think it should ask you the first time whether you want it to do this (just in case it scares people), but, except that, this seems sensible.

Perhaps, now is the time to switch to Gecko.

Gecko is the rendering engine (backend) used by Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Netscape, Galleon, &c, so, if you use any of those browsers, you already use Gecko.

Re:proof in the pudding

[Trogre]

"Proof in the pudding"

I think the proverb you were looking for is actually:

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to find that guy who "could care less".

About the config

[PromANJ]

Type about:config in the url to bring up the config then in the filter field type search. That will list the relevant config settings I think. I had trouble finding any good explaination for all the settings in the config. I wish they had made an little info button or alt hover text text for each setting.