Slashdot Mirror
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."
Google are the new MS, forming links with good technology and talent, then manipulating it for their own selfish needs.
Trust me Google are the new evil.
really does pay off!
Wow, Google is everywhere nowadays. I really hope they won't go all "evil corporation" on us.
With the string of announcements of smart moves over the last few days why is the share price not soaring?
UK Laptops
Well congrats to Ben. All the best at Google. But I do wonder how Firefox could be MORE integrated with Goggle?
I mean.. you start it up.. you have google at the top right, and if you use the default home page, you will link to the google search engine. There are google toolbar plugins available. What else can there be?
Should be interesting to see what they come up with...
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
I'm sure this story will generate a slew of positive responses about Google supporting the Open Source Community, and how Linux is one of the technologies they rely upon. there will be some concern, but not much.
What I'm wondering, is how would the Slashdot community respond if it were Microsoft doing the hiring, and THEY were promising Ben's day to day tasks wouldn't change much.
How would people react?
What would be the theories of WHY Microsoft would be supporting a Firefox developer?
Let's set aside the arguments about why this is an implausible scenario and the obvious Microsoft bashing and ask, aside from the exceptions above, what would be the reaction to such an announcement?
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Yes, there are numerous articles and such in the past that have mentioned that most Google engineers get 10% of free time to devote to their own projects.
Orkut was born this way, as well as Google Sets and likely numerous other projects.
So from what I gather, google is collecting every scrap of information about everything. This spans from the basic google websearch to google desktop search and eventually google e-mail searching (searching for anonymous content from within their growing gmail database).
When google takes over our web browsers, they will also be able to collect info on more than just what we are searching for -- they will know how we are finding desired content.
Pretty soon google will know everything about everyone. People won't have to bother with the trouble of defining ourselves in the real world anymore -- inspection and introspection of humans can be done through tomorrow's google. I presume it will be utopia.
I am wearing a tinfoil hat right now. What they are doing is perfectly legal. But I still think it is a bit scary.
So this means the Google will get the features it wants and to hell with everyone else, including standards compliance which seems to be taken a back seat these days.
I've never done so before, but this comment prompted me to run the basic main Google page through the w3c validator; the results were suprising. It's such a simple page; why not take the (minimal!) time necessary to code proper HTML?! Yikes. I didn't expect that level of sloppiness.
(Yes, my personal page validates just fine, thanks (though some subpages may not, given the age of a lot of the code, and the multiple generations of sites the content pages have churned through... After I graduate and pass the Bar, maybe I'll have time to go back and fix them...)
geek. lawyer.
If this isn't a conflict of interest I don't know what is..
I REALLY hope they stick to the "Do no Evil", because with this sort of move, they have the oppertunity to be either very very _good_ or just as easily be very very _evil_.
Then again.. its Open Sourced... so if google try anything even slightly askew, the code will be forked or better yet just plain rejected.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Google is all about gathering personal information now. They will make sure there's nothing in Firefox to impede that information gathering.
If they encounter opposition in the Mozilla framework, they'll fork, and the GoogleBrowser will be born (and Mozilla will die, at least as far as market share goes).
You are very right to ask "What does Google get out of this relationship?" The answer, in this case, is much more simple and benign. It is a benefit to Google to have a healthy competitor for IE. Especially since MSN's search utility is their primary competitor. MS could just as easily make some IE only enhancements to MSN (i.e., ActiveX controls for context-based searching or something). This is more difficult for Google to do since they remain forced to support IE. They can't add features to Firefox and lock out IE since the vast majority of their market base still uses IE. If and when that changes, a closer look at the Google/Firefox relationship will be warranted. As of right now it's just a way for google to try to maintain a level playing field with MS.
I'm of two minds about this announcement. Ben has put a large amount of hard work to ensure the success of Firefox, given a great deal to the project. He should be free to parlay that work into any opportunity he wants, and certainly deserves recognition for all he's given to the open source community. Having said all that, I can't help but be a little concerned about the continuing Google acquisition/release binge that has been going on for some time. I'm a little paranoid at best, and can't help but feel there may be some privacy issues arise in the future as Google will be tied into everything associated with the web. Maybe I'm worrying for nothing, but maybe I better stock up on tinfoil hats. Best of luck to Ben, and best of luck (we may need it) to those of us that are dedicated Firefox users (privacy being one of the major reasons for adopting itin the first place).
This is an example of an interesting trend.
Companies are starting to hire people who make a name for themselves while working on open source projects. This makes sense on several levels.
The developer has proven themselves in an environment where capability is obvious, transparent, and peer reviewed. Try getting that out of a resume. They are hiring a known.
The company gets to use that person's *fame*/name as a marketing tool.
The developer is probably more willing to put in the extra hours because they must enjoy coding to spend so much spare time doing it.
This helps the open source movement a well. If new developers get out and try to earn a name, they'll probably start putting more effort if they think their code might get them a good job. They might take the peer review more seriously.
as well, I'll keep dreaming...
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Actually this makes me wonder about this.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Google is all about gathering personal information now.
Your evidence for this remarkable claim?
Seriously, I don't think Google have ever asked me for any marketable information. Not even when I signed up for GMail. If that's really what they're "all about", they're doing a pretty dire job of it.
The amazing fact that, in future releases, all links to Altavista, Yahoo search, Lycos, Excite, etc, will amazingly redirect to Google...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Google uses the HTML they way they do to save everybyte, notice in their source 1 char var names, its designed to be small and simple to save bandwidth, save 10 bytes from 100,000,000 million hits thats 10,000,000 bytes, ~9-10 gb?
also it always looks right no matter what your useing so its all good.
Why can't a guy get a job in the tech sector even though he's working on an oss project and everyone not get on the companies back for hiring him?
Because there is more to it than the naked eye can see, you would be naive if you see this move from Google as just another hire. Think.
I shot the sheriff
I find it kind of funny that people worry so much about Google invading peoples privacy, but don't worry about things like trusted computing being silently pushed towards us, which is already happening...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
This is only a conspiracy theory if you believe that Ben is a different person than he really is. Speaking as an AC, I am confident that the Firefox project will not be corrupted/damaged by the Google relationship, partly because bonsai makes it _really_ hard to check something in sneaky-like, and partly because there's a whole whack of people who would back bad things out if they were really bad. (I am one of those people.) To be honest, I trust Google more than I trust the Mozilla Foundation to guide Firefox in the right direction. The public halo hung on MoFo is out of step with the real role they played in making Firefox what it is. For the first time in the Mozilla project's history, it was actually volunteers grinding in the trenches to make the release happen the way it did. From testers to triagers to unpaid hackers, there was a vast amount of effort that went into making things work. Sure, there were some paid hackers/QA besides Ben who pitched in for a few months, but the reality is, their contribution is dwarfed by the outside world.
google may want to establish browser based applications eventually. The gmail, google suggest and blogspot are examples of browser based applications.
Some people may want to say, "Ah... the javascript is so slow!" But if we can run perl on a headless server and handle thousands or even millions of request per day, why can't we run javascript applications on client side efficiently?
But what the advantage? The advantage is easy management and share of data. Instead of store files on different computers, data could be stored on several servers, protected and backuped by professional operators. Users use the data tranparently via the Internet.
Google will run thousands of servers, and sell the computing and storage power on the server side. Also, google will use their search engine to search different "functions" provided by different "application providers", just as they are search "information" provided by different "content providers" now.
As format of document files and vector graphs, xml with the help of CSS and javascript of course.
But there is a problem here. The support of this sort of "high technology" on the browser used by most people is lamed. So to facilitate the adoption of high level technology, google will bring the browser war on again.
After this war, the rich function web application may become easier for web developers, but learning curves will become harder.
If the days of browser based computing come eventually, desktop is not big business anymore, server will become the center again.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Maybe this mean we'll *finally* get an "official" Mozilla/Firefox Googlebar, complete with Pagerank measurer? It's not like the unofficial one is lacking in features (other than Pagerank), but it's always annoyed me that all Google is willing to support with the official bar is IE.
Someone else also mentioned Google Desktop Search, which will search through your IE cache in its scan of your hard drive but ignores Firefox's. Google has a bit of catching up to do to support Firefox as well as it does IE with extra features....