Google Hires Lead FireFox Engineer

As announced on his blog yesterday, Ben Goodger, the lead FireFox engineer has changed his “source of income” from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. He states that his role with FireFox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, continuing with the goals of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases of the FireFox browser. However, its his new role with search engine giant, Google, that has people talking.

Actions such as the hiring of Goodger and the registration of the “gbrowser.com” domain have fueled speculation that Google may be developing their own web browser, in direct competition with Microsoft.
Industry analysts have ventured that combining Google’s search, GMail, Blogger publishing, and pop-up blockers could be a not too distant target for the company.
Google recently hosted the Mozilla Developer Day at its Mountain View, headquarters. And has hired a number of other big name engineers in the browser space.

[Via CMSwire]