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

so open source programming

[sharkfish]

really does pay off!

All this google good news

[mishmash]

With the string of announcements of smart moves over the last few days why is the share price not soaring?

Re:All this google good news

[PureCreditor]

Investors are not COMPLETE idiots. After the initial hype, people will settle down, and at $200 a share, few other than institutional investors would consider GOOG.

However, with all the hype piled up on Google, and when it's trading at a P/E larger than 100, institutional investors will have a LOT of explaining to do on their proforma on why they invested in GOOG in the first place.

eBay already tanked 18% upon a single quarterly earnings report, and eBay was only trading at maybe P/E of 110.

What if it were Microsoft?

[doublem]

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?

Re:Free Time

[daeg]

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.

Re:How can Google get more integrated?

[Coryoth]

How about interesting XUL based interfaes for GMail, Froogle, Orkut etc. A simple browser detect determines if you have Firefox/Mozilla, and if you do it gives you the XUL version... if not you get the same ordinary version you get now.

Entirely possible, and could be very cool if done well, but to be honest I see it as unlikely.

Jedidiah.

Re:Hummm...

[crankyspice]

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...)

Oh please do no evil...

[marcushnk]

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.

Re:Corruption of FireFox Development?

[tool462]

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.

proof in the pudding

[willCode4Beer.com]

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...

Re:Maybe he was just bitter

[nocomment]

Actually this makes me wonder about this.

Re:This is bad

[a whoabot]

Firefox is already too intertwined with Google.

To remove Google as the default search engine in the search bar you have to manually delete the files, whereas adding engines is integrated.

And to remove Google as the engine that is used when you use the "Search Web for" context menu option you have change some config file that is not easy to find. I've searched through the Firefox directories(install and profiles) for occurences of "google," and there are many occurences, but I could not find something that looked like it would be it. I can not find information on how to do this from the "Mozilla KnowledgeBase," although I don't deny that it may exist. The help files are of course totally useless.

Why this assumption that no one would use anything but Google for searching? I my opinion Alltheweb is a far superior search engine.

I'm not suggesting this has anything to do with Google pushing for these features. Saying merely what I said.

Re:This is bad

[pyite]

Open source, free, community projects and gigantic, multinational corporations do not mix.

IBM, anyone? There is a good way and a bad way to mix open source and a big corporation. IBM does it right, Apple does it right. I don't know what you're so worried about.