And Dr Stamm is now a privacy advocate at the Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the development of the Firefox web browser.

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The company, fully aware of Windows 8's slow, looming approach to market, has set its sights on that unclaimed slice of market pie, hunkering down into development of a Metro-style Firefox, announced just this past February.

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The Web-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia and the Internet browser Mozilla Firefox are just two of the products whose development relies upon the contribution of a community of online users.

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"There's no Firefox, no Internet Explorer - and there's not likely to be because of the development environment, " he added.

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