The Open Source giant Mozilla, proud owner of Firefox and Thunderbird, to name just a couple of Internet hits, has hired on Wednesday the president of Humanized, a startup from Chicago for his experience with UI interfaces. The name of the newly employed should ring a bell: Aza Raskin is the son of the Apple interface designer Jef Raskin.

The move to Mozilla must have had young Aza scared, so he brought along some familiar faces from his old company, namely Atul Varma and Jono DiCarlo. Their project is to make the user interfaces that Mozilla will be "endowing" its products with a lot more intuitive. The former CEO of Humanized said that the technology he and his colleagues will be working on will let people "do anything you want to do, anywhere, anytime on your computer."

The Enso project that Humanized was involved with was the reason for this move. The Enso UI was set up to let its users have an easier time when performing daily tasks that required using more than one applications or functions. As a practical application, if somebody wanted to open an app, instead of having to search for the shortcut he could just type "open [insert application name here]" after hitting the Caps Lock key.

Aza Raskin said that because of the interface being sometimes difficult to understand or to manage, many people are up against a limited experience, only those in the know being able to use a computer's full array of options and at its full capacity. That's where he and his team at Mozilla come in and try to fix everything, so that everybody is happy.

He's got some pretty far-fetched ideas like the one he wrote on his blog: "I want the power of mashups not in the hands of the developer but in the hands of end-users -- in the hands of your grandmothers and your teen-aged son. […] So you really can be writing an e-mail and say, 'Now I want a map in there.' Things like that -- a place where you can actually start having a conversation with your computer." What can I say, I hope for Mozilla's sake that the talent and vision is being passed on genetically.