Ben Goodger the lead programmer of the Mozilla Firefox Web browser announced Monday on his blog that he took a job with Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California on Jan. 10, adding more oil to the burning rumor mill of Google's plan to launch a browser. Google's recent acquisition of the gbrowser.com domain, hiring of key programmers, and sponsorship of a Mozilla programmer meeting fueled speculation that a web browser is in the works, in direct competition with Microsoft. Goodger's title at Google will be software engineer, he will continue work on the Firefox Web browser continuing with the goals of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases of the Firefox browser.

According to the plans published on the Firefox Wiki page, version 1.1 is called Deer Park. Plans for that new version include tools to help users of several Mac OS X browsers move their settings to Firefox. Version 1.5, called The Ocho, is slated to get improvements in accessibility and for use on large groups of computers. Planned version 2.0 features include improvements to tabbed browsing, password management, software updates, software downloads and performance on Apple Computer systems.