He cited a revolution in hardware, with computers shrinking to pocket size, happening at the same time the Web is expanding. But he expressed disappointment at efforts by some to constrain developers.

"However, my enthusiasm for this amazing new world is tempered by some unfortunate decisions made by some of the players in this space. It seems that some view this revolution as a chance to seize power in downright Orwellian ways by constraining what we as developers can say, dictating what kinds of apps we can create, controlling how we distribute our apps and placing all kinds of limits on what can do to our computing devices," Galbraith said.

The Palm opportunity, Galbraith said, gives he and Almaer "the opportunity to run Palm's developer program and to do things quite a bit differently than some others in the industry have done."

Both men expressed intentions to continue working with the Mozilla community.

"Dion and I believe in the Web platform-an open platform that no single vendor controls-and we believe in empowering and enabling developers. We have been honored to work with so many who feel the same way at Mozilla, we will continue to advocate those values as members of the Mozilla community and we can't wait to put these ideals into practice in our work at Palm," Galbraith said.