Google Hires Lead Firefox Dev

In an interesting bit of news (via DrunkenBlog) it appears that Google has hired Ben Goodger, one of the lead developers on Firefox.

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.

Time to restart the GoogleBrowser rumours again? Given how much you can customise Firefox/Mozilla through the use of XUL, I wouldn't be surprised if Google has something much bigger than just a branded browser up it's sleeve. We just haven't worked out what it is yet. Front end to the GoogleGrid perhaps?