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Currently Firefox on a Mac comees a poor second against the likes of Safari, suffering from a poor interface and is much slower than either the Windows version or Safari.

Josh Aas will focus on code that the two browsers share and on Firefox-specific OS X code. Early projects will include cleaning up form widgets such as content-area buttons and text field and improving page loading speed and rendering, probably by making the Gecko rendering engine use the Quartz API instead of Quickdraw. This will also reduce load on the CPU by moving rendering tasks to the graphics card.

'In general, my goal is to make using Firefox on Mac OS X a better experience in terms of its user interface,' Aas wrote in his blog. 'At the moment, Firefox does an acceptable job of looking and behaving like it has a native Mac OS X user interface, but it could be a lot better. I am going to do my best to improve the situation. Its a big job, but now I should have plenty of time to do it.'

Previously, Aas worked exclusively, though unpaid, on Camino. Consequently

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his appointment has raised questions about the browser's future.

Camino's chief developer, Mike Pinkerton, insists that there is nothing to worry about.

'First and foremost, the Mozilla Foundation hiring Josh is not a slight to myself or the Camino project,' he blogged. 'I was very much involved in the hiring process and gave him a glowing recommendation. He is the right person for the job.

'Second, I've had several people ask me what Camino is going to do now that Josh is no longer working on it. The fact that Josh is at the Foundation is a huge plus for Camino. Josh is being paid to work on core architecture that benefits Firefox, Thunderbird, and Camino on Mac OS X. Shared infrastructure is a good thing; the more we can share the better. '

Camino development has been stalled while work is being done on components shared with Firefox, but version 0.8.3 is expected soon, though most of the changes can be seen in the latest nightly build. As we reported in December, version 0.9, projected for the second half of this year, will feature: a redesigned tab interface; an overhauled preferences system; a rewritten keychain implementation; form autofill; spell checking in forms; improvements to the download manager; event system overhaul for better flash performance and reduced CPU; and better bookmark and history searching with history access via the Go menu. Such changes, coupled with the work being done by Aas, should bring its feature set and performance up to or even beyond Safari's.