Google has hired a lead developer of Firefox. Ben Goodger has been intimately involved with many facets of FireFox since its inception, and also worked previously on Netscape back in the more productive days of the AOL/Netscape cabal.

Ben Goodger said:

As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above - with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general. I'm sure you have many questions. While I will be spending more time at Google, I will work out of the Mozilla Foundation offices regularly as the need arises. For all questions regarding Google, I ask that you contact Google directly, rather than myself.

About Ben Goodger:

My name is Ben Goodger...

... I am 24 years old...

I was born in London, England - but spent most of my life in Auckland, New Zealand.

I live in Campbell, California.

I work for The Mozilla Foundation and am the lead engineer on the Firefox browser project. Some of the key areas in the browser I am responsible for include: the Extension system, Software Update, Preference Migration for IE, Opera, Seamonkey, Netscape 4, etc, Windows shell integration, the new Download system, the new Options UI, the new permission manager UI for things like popup blocking and XPInstall and the Windows Install Wizard. Of the code that originates from the Mozilla Suite I was the original author of the buggy bookmarks manager UI (much improved by folk like Pierre, Vlad and Myk in Firefox but still buggy), save-page-with-images (much improved by other contributors since the original version), and the original Classic theme upon which much of Qute and later Winstripe were based. I have done a significant amount of UI design both for features I have implemented and those implemented by others. I have done a large chunk of the project management of the project, tracking bugs and scheduling milestones, have in the past maintained the project and product home pages, began the first serious and successful attempt to market the product in April 2003, and have acted as a liason between various contributing groups. Outside of cvs.mozilla.org I also maintain the Magpie extension which is a set of downloading utilities.

I used to work for America Online/Netscape and have contributed to a number of their products (Netscape 6, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1) before the demise of Netscape browser development in July 2003.

I graduated from The University of Auckland in May 2003 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Systems Engineering.