Mozilla loses Blizzard to California start-up

Chris Blizzard served his last day as Mozilla's director of Web platform this past Friday, March 16, he revealed on his blog. He will move on to a "very small startup" based in Palo Alto, though didn't go on to name it. Blizzard would only say the work involves the intersection of systems, compilers, and web-scale problems.

Blizzard was involved with Mozilla since its inception since 1998, though not always as an employee. His more recent work included running the developer evangelism and marketing group as well as did platform product management. He also wrote code, maintained his own module, drove, and super-reviewed while at Mozilla.

The not-for-profit organization also lost a number of other high-profile members lately, including former release manager Christian Legnitto who went on to Facebook, Firefox principal designer Alex Faaborg, former Firefox technical strategy leader Mike Shaver, and former Mozilla WebGL graphics developer Vladimir Vukicevic, who was also instrumental in developing Firefox for Android. A one-time director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, also left the organization.

The turnover rate is somewhat worrying for someone who is trying to compete with the likes of Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and smaller players such as Safari on iOS devices and Opera Mini for portable devices. Firefox isn't available on iOS or Windows Phone devices.

Mozilla is working on a Boot 2 Gecko mobile operating system to compete with Google's Chrome OS. It runs apps based on HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. During a brief hands-on, we found the in-progress interface to be clunky but promising. [via CNET]

By Electronista Staff

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