The director of Web platform work moves to an unnamed startup, so Mozilla needs a new executive to guide the arrival of standards crucial to Firefox and Web apps.

Chris Blizzard, a high-profile figure in the Firefox world, has left his job as Mozilla's director of Web platform to join a startup.

I'm trying something new and starting in the next week or so I'm going to be joining a very small startup that's based in Palo Alto," Blizzard said in his announcement last week on his blog. "I happened to stumble across an amazing team that's doing great (and difficult!) work that deals with the intersection of systems, compilers, and web-scale problems.

Blizzard has been in charge of the "Web platform" work at Mozilla. It may sound like obscure jargon, but what it actually means is tremendously important: the upgrade of the Web from a repository of documents into a foundation for software that runs on everything from mobile phones and cars to tablets and TVs. Much of the work is embodied in the term HTML5, though in technical terms it extends well beyond version 5 of the Hypertext Markup Language standard used to describe Web pages.

Firefox doesn't reach all these markets, but Mozilla and Firefox remain active forces in adapting Web standards so Web apps can span a tremendous range of devices.

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