“Google practically ‘owns’ the development of Firefox (the browser’s lead engineer and most of the other full-time devs are Google staff) – and so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume this to ramp up the creation of a kick-ass browser for the GPhone.”

Google doesn’t practically own shit when it comes to Firefox. The lead engineer for the Firefox browser is Mike Connor and he works for Mozilla. Mozilla employs about 40 full-time engineers working on Firefox (and the Firefox backend.) Google, as far as I know, pays zero full-time engineers to work on Firefox. There are another thousand or so part-time contributors to the Mozilla codebase that work at any number of other companies, attend various schools, etc. But, rest assured, Google does not make up any significant part of that mix.

There was a brief period of time after Google hired Ben Goodger (then Firefox lead) away from Mozilla that Ben was both a Google employee and a Mozilla engineering lead. That was years ago. There was also a brief period of time when Google had a handful of full-time people contributing to Mozilla. Neither of those are the case today nor have then been for some time.

- A

Ben is no longer contributing towards Firefox/Mozilla as he is working at both Google (yes I know there are Mozilla Project contributors who work there and IBM et al) and on other projects.

His post about the future of Firefox/Thunderbird he states that he’s no longer working on Firefox:

Originally from http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/018226.html

July 3, 2007
The Autonomous Future?

Editorial Note: I don’t typically post to this blog anymore since I’m not actively contributing to Firefox these days. However I’ve received suggestions that I link to this post from here since it’s Mozilla-related, so that folk who subscribe to planet will receive the link to the April post on my personal blog.

“One of the great things about open development discussion is that you can usually expect some crank to come along weeks after a heated debate and throw gas on the fire.

Tonight I am that crank. In the thread “Mozilla 2 repository migration dirlist” in the mozilla.dev.platform group there is a lot of discussion about the allocation of resources to various projects within Mozilla by the Mozilla Corporation. This brings to a head an issue that I’ve seen growing for the past couple of years since the Mozilla Corporation was formed.”

I have not met him so I cannot say his reasons for no longer being involved with the Mozilla Project on that level. But, I would imagine he would be working with Mozilla in some capacity like Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu as a module owner possibly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/11/news.guardianweeklytechnologysection

As long as they clear up the memory leaks that firefox is prone to (or the extensions).

The Google Maps Application
http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html
has its own little browsing platform.

Mapperz (mildly dyslexic too)
http://mapperz.blogspot.com/

“Ben Goodger, who was one of the lead developers on the Mozilla Project along with Blake Ross is working full time at Google and is no longer actively contributing/involved with Mozilla or Firefox.”

Hmmm, are you saying Ben Goodger is no longer activlely involved/contributing with the Mozilla project because he is working full time at Google?

If so, I think you’ll find his role at Google is (or at least two years ago when I met him) was to be Firefox’s lead developer as a paid Googler (as I’ve written in my post).

The fact that’s he’s full time at Google doesn’t mean he’s not full time at Firefox – Google has a whole team of fulltime Firefox engineers on staff.

Let me know if I’ve miss-read your post and you know more about this then I do. Like I said, I met Ben two years ago now and I can’t really go into the details of the circumstances for reasons, er, I can’t go into either. I don’t know what the current status is.

I’m not claiming to write proof-read editorial copy – these are my thoughts and notes often written out over a sandwich at lunch or during precious periods of downtime between tasks (I have a day job as a consultant, I’m not TechCrunch).

I’d rather put up copy that isn’t 100% in the time spaces available to me then run out of time and fail to publish anything. If grammatical errors bother you that much then there are plenty of other places on the net to consume media.

I’m not putting it up as an excuse, but I would also point out that I am dyslexic and as such these are the kinds of typo’s I’m prone to making without careful proof reading (which I simply don’t have time for quite often).

Before lines of code are written/ported the dev team has to know whether they are building for a Windows Mobile environment (.Net family), Blackberry devices (Java) or Linux (presumably C or variant thereof), etc.

I doubt that Mozilla would go to the trouble of developing a mobile browser for the ‘Gphone’ purely to save the embarrassment brought about by a browser maker needing to use someone else’s browser on their phone. Once again, ideas are stolen and the big marketing party begins. Well, in case you didn’t know since Opera don’t have the press in their pockets, it’s here already: Opera mini / mobile.

Isn’t it about time that companies (and politicians for UK residents!) stopped ripping of others’ ideas and started innovating? Isn’t that what free markets, open source and consumer choice should be about?