Steve Rubel points out that Google has hired a developer off the Firefox team. This is once again increasing speculation that Google is building a browser.

As someone who develops web based applications for a living I live in fear of this day. I don't care what Google is building I just hope and pray that it's not a browser. I really don't think I can take another browser. What's that you say? It's based on Mozilla so that's good you say? Hogwash.

Netscape, Firefox, and Camino are all based on Mozilla. Guess what, they each have their own quirks as it is. Now add GBrowser, plus IE 5, IE5.5, IE6, IE6 SP2, AOL Browser, and Safari. Now your talking real money in testing and development. Sure if they all followed the specs it wouldn't matter, but they don't and they won't so adding more won't make anything better.

So please Google don't build a browser and in the meantime maybe Scoble + Firefox + talk of a Google browser will be enough to wakeup Microsoft and get them going on IE again before the market crumbles into total disarray.