Facebook Lures Mozilla Engineering VP To Its Lair

On Monday Facebook got a lot of tech cred with the hire of Mike Schroepfer, who jumped ship at Mozilla where he was vice president of engineering at Mozilla and who was the former CTO at Sun Microsystems.

Schroepfer makes the move to the social networking site in September, where he will head up the front-end and platform development for the social networking site. He reports to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The Inside Facebook blog quotes Zuckerberg saying, "Mike has a lot of experience building great products and engineering teams. At Mozilla, he built Firefox 3 and manages the product development process — a particularly impressive position given the global, collaborative and open process in which Mozilla operates and develops its products. Facebook has similar values and Mike will be a great addition to our engineering team."

In his role as CTO at Sun, Schroepfer oversaw the company's data center automation division ("N1"). Schroepfer joined Sun as part of its acquisition of CenterRun, which he founded and served as its chief architect and director of engineering.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has wooed -- or some would say poached -- considerable tech talent recently, including Sheryl Sandberg who became COO in March, after leaving Google where she was vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations; Ethan Beard, the ex-director social media at Google and a host of other ex-Googlers.

In fact, the Inside Facebook blog has calculated that as of late March, "over 40, or almost 10 percent, and mostly engineering or product people," were former Google employees. In April, one of the most famous names in technology, Marc Andreessen, joined the company's board of directors. Andreessen is the co-author of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape and co-founder of Ning, a platform provider of social-networking Websites.

Facebook seems to be taking its tech know-how muscle to the mat. Just last week, the company overhauled its design which it characterized as "cleaner and simpler," and also offered users a new way to preview and test next-generation features and functionality.

Also last week, Microsoft revealed that it plans to weave Live Search into Facebook, which will enable users to run Internet searches from within the social networking site and also features Microsoft's paid search advertising.

In his blog, Schroepfer said that he is proud of what Mozilla was able to accomplish and praised his colleagues.

"We've shipped Firefox 1.5, 2, and the amazing Firefox 3 together, taken the active users from tens of millions to more than 185 million in almost 50 languages, achieved 50 percent 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," Schroepfer wrote. "This is the first time I've decided to leave something I really truly love -- I will dearly miss getting a chance to work with all of you every day. Everyone that I've met from the community has, and will continue to be, a huge inspiration to me."