Tuesday, October 19, 2004

MozillaNews (re)Ponders Google's Browser Plans

It seems that some people within Mozilla are digging up certain inconsistencies and covert goings-on which add to the speculation of a new Google browser may still be in the works.
"As I stated, Mozilla.org and Mozilla developers have been very quiet on all of this. But with such an open organization, it's hard to hide all secrets. There have been a lot of hidden bugs in Bugzilla related to searching, bugs that even members of the Security group can't access. Recently, there was a bug duplicated to a confidential bug with the following comment by the triager: 'This is a duplicate of a private bug about working with Google. So closing this one.' That bug also now closed, but it was open long enough for people to notice it.



There's also a lot of 'covert' code going into the tree without individual bug references. And none of these patches are being checked in by Google staff, but by other Mozilla developers, ostensibly checking in code for Google employees to keep a low profile. None of this is Google-exclusive, per se, as much as it is code that one could easily see as making life easier for a third party developer making heavy integration changes. The checking commends are usually very technically described, possibly to obfuscate their use to the majority of watchers to maintain the secret. Example"
The bug mentioned above, is one that I reported on earlier, in which Blogzilla's Pindar reported that Bug 226572 - Google branded Mozilla browser was suddenly marked as Private. Now a duplicate bug appears, and disappears from sight. This time the reason for marking it Private is because of "working with Google". It is still unclear what the bug actually is, but it does show that there is activity going on around this non-existant Google browser.



There are also recent acknowledgements from the Google camp which fan the flames even higher. Google, being Google, are pretty good at secrets though. This is one that they are seemingly playing very close to the vest.

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