Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Can Google help Firefox?

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his artcile Firefox Is Heading Towards Trouble said, "If the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox friends like Google don't start spending money—right now—to hire more programmers, more project managers and more servers, it won't matter how many ads in the New York Times Firefox supporters take out, Firefox will have already reached its high tide of popularity and we can only wait for the ebb to begin." I think he has a good point. There has been much speculation about Google and the gBrowser. What there are up to is certainly not clear. But it seems a pretty good bet that they are doing something with the firefox code base. Although this may dilute the market share for pure firefox, I suspect it would help a lot with code quality, and may even server capacity.