Firefox suffers a huge loss as Mike Schroepfer defects from the Mozilla Foundation to the potential riches of Facebook.

The VP of engineering at Firefox opted for a new challenge, as he announced an exit from the popular browser maker.

“I’m moving on from my role at Mozilla Corporation to head up the front-end and platform development at Facebook.   I’ll be here for at least a few weeks after the summit so we’ll have plenty of time to catch-up before I go,” he said on his Mozilla blog, before listing some of the gains Firefox made in his time:

We’ve shipped Firefox 1.5, 2, and the amazing Firefox 3 together, taken the active users from tens of millions to >185 million in almost 50 languages, achieved 50% market share in some countries, built a thriving Add-ons ecosystem, moved into mobile, scaled our operations across the globe, and most importantly of all continued to build a thriving, passionate, talented community that is a blast to be part of.

He’ll see some pretty good scale at Facebook too. The social networking site grew 40 percent year over year for June 2008, according to figures from Hitwise.

Meanwhile, Mike Shaver will take over for Schroepfer. Mozilla CEO John Lilly announced Shaver will be the interim VP of engineering, which makes it sound like a candidate search is under way at the organization for a full-time replacement.

Posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 12:20 pm. Permalink