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Meet The Co-Creator of Firefox
Jay Langhurst writes "Learn more about the roots of Firefox and about the 19-year-old who co-created the browser in this article. 'To take an internship at Netscape during the summer of 2001, Ross moved with his mother to a rented apartment near Netscape's offices in Mountain View, Calif. She drove him to work each morning.'"
Slashdot still doesn't render correctly in FF...
At least we know he's a real geek.
Is the apartment two-floors, so he can still be in mom's basement?
I want to hug him, kiss him, have his children....
I want FireFox for Amiga.
Gee, I wonder what codebase he used to create Firefox, then?
feh. stuff.
1) Download Mozilla code
2) Change the name and turn off several features in the Makefile
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
You may disagree with me, but you have to acknowledge the existance of my highly educated opinion.
How the hell did he do THAT??
And have his appearances in major newspapers posted on his eponymous Web site helped with those California girls at school?
"They're the ones that aren't impressed at all," he said with a laugh
In Korea gettig driven to work by your mum is only for old people.
Have you metaroderated recently?
So refreshing to see he didn't live in his mothers basement....
Odd isn't it - how many times a flat broke intern turns our entire industry upside-down?
On another note, I wonder how the IE team feels knowing that an intern who had to share an apartment with his mom and have her drive him to work basically outperformed their entire team.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Just think, If every 19 year old did and internship and produced something of this quality by the time they were 19 and still being driven to work by mum and not colecting royalties. Someday, bloody someday.
Shoddy journalism and taking comments out of context.
Note how its not actually quotes but summed up by the reporter...that's his mistake not Ross's.
Studies have shown that a million monkeys, banging on a million typewriters, will produce Microsoft-standards-compliant IE releases on an average of once every 6 minutes.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Does anyone have a good understanding of the actual role Ross played here and whether the media reports are being fair to other contributors by focussing on him?
I'll bet Al Gore will claim it's his sun!
Here is what he did say: "During my years on the stellar construction advisory board, I was involved in a lot of initiatives. Not only did I create the sun, I created the moon and planets and a pair of really swell comets."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Co-creator? FireFox is derived from the Mozilla code base, with a few changes. The creators of Mozilla are the real creators of FireFox. It's wrong to give any amount of credit for the creation of FireFox to someone who just added some little features and optimized it a bit. The media just likes to make the "story" more interesting by saying a 19 year old "kid" created something used by millions. I can see a new media sweet-heart in the making. Like Linus Torvalds. Yes, he started a good kernel and gave a major kick to Free Software development, but it seems like the media just loves project as if he created every program we use on a Linux distro today and tends to forget the fact there people/groups of people who have done as much as or even more than him.
10,000 people create/maintain/do the work/ on firefox and 1 person scoops up the credit for it all ! nice to pad out their resume with
just like the real corp world, you do the work someone else takes the credit
...this isn't helping the lives-with-his-mother geek stereotype much.
Is this the same kid that they interviewed in that documentary called Code Rush that was on PBS a few years ago?
Why do I have the feeling Ross is Bill Gates's long lost son? If this was Greek Mythology: Bill would be Zeus and Ross would be Hercules. Some how Bill stuffed his mother 19 and odd so months ago
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
It couldn't help the stereotype more!
Is there any chance that we can use him as the other example?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Wired Magazine prominently features Blake Ross on the cover of their Feb '05 issue for their lead story, "The Firefox Explosion."
;^)" ]
Wired Mag doesn't have the cover online yet, meaning I probably got it from a newstand that put it out early (the 34th St PATH Station newstand in NYC, for those interested).
The issue also features an "interesting" piece: a fake memo from the future...written to one Bill Gates from newly-hired employee Linus Torvalds - concerning Winux, Microsoft's next-generation OS.
[Apparently, Bill's "pitch" to Linus in this post-apocalyptic future was "come on Linus...infect the Mothership
Anyway, I hate to sound like a pitchman for Wired, but it's worth the look.
**sigh**
I always have to wait halfway through the month for the damn magazine to arrive (I never expected a subscrition would bite me in the ass).
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
He has worked hard and it has paid off for him. I hope he can continue to grow in his career and keep up the good work.
Congrats.
firefox is PROHAMMER
--;
www.HammerRevolution.com
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." --Newton to Hooke, 5 Feb. 1676;
'Nuff said really.
The Wired cover is available here:
Wired.com
It's posted, just not linked up.
Per Asa Dotzler's blog
I know that there is an auto-backup of the website for the original story, but it seems that Blake's personal site is down too.
I see that he is running WordPress - there is a note how to avoid the Slashdot effect for WordPress but maybe he did not activate the plug-ins.
I just installed the Slashfix mentioned in parent, and the rendering problem is no more. Band-aid or not, it works. (Thanks!)
Firefox is nice, but it's yet another browser. That's one thing that shocked me. Netscape brought the browser to the masses but they never really moved passed it.
For quite sometime people's needs have grown beyond the browser. Java Applet, and ActiveX have been bolted on, but what is needed is a more seamless integration that provides a more traditional application feel.
It's unfortunately that we're still stuck using a "browser" when what we need is something more dynamic and powerfull.
Firefox is yet another browser. Definitely better than many of the current crop. But it would be nice to see something truly innovative.
--
I forgot my sig line
In order to get more marketshare we need to get more attention.
Someone please implement MajorityNow:
Surfs while your computer is idle to increase the browser usage stats for Firefox.
I know it was only a joke, but it might help making a difference. I 'd leave it running 24/7 on my company machine.
Bizzaro Internet Explorer that is.
Junis has it running on the Commodore-64. He says the Amiga port should be available shortly. More updates to follow.
Odd, I have a subscription and I got it on Saturday. Maybe it's because of location? (I'm in DC)
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
What was I doing when I was 10? Learning to ride my bike.
14? riding my bike.
19? Discovered Slashdot
present day: Have not been outside since. no bike riding. Still reading slashdot.
"...And have his appearances in major newspapers posted on his eponymous Web site helped with those California girls at school?
Yeah, the chicks aren't impressed. But soon as the dude starts rolling in some cash and driving an expensive car, suddenly, they will be interested."They're the ones that aren't impressed at all," he said with a laugh...."
I hope this kid takes a warning from Chairman Bill and passes up the opportunity to pose for kittenish pix in teen mags.
Whether he made significant contributions or not I think it's okay to let the media run with it. It's no secret that Computer Science and many other things IT are waning in interest with his age group. They're cynical for many reasons -- corporate monoliths, off-shoring, soft market conditions, rapid change, etc. It's hard to hang your hat in this industry because it's difficult to see the future. Especially if you're thinking about spending $100,000 on an education.
So why does it hurt to be enthusiastic about his participation? Did he contribute? Yes. Is it successful? Wildly. Should more kids his age try it. Absolutely!
C'mon folks, pay it forward.
You and your mum don't even work.
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There's nothing cooler on the world than being front cover of Wired magazine, specially when it's for being co-author of the best browser around. That makes him hot enough for me. Yummy.
Holy crap, put a lightsaber in his hand and he looks like Anakin.
He probably acts better than Hayden Christensen, too, although I'll wager he'd have a hard time (no pun intended) keeping it professional whilst making out with every geek's favourite fantasy, Natalie Portman.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
So the real heros can be found under http://www.mozilla.org/credits/
I've just recieved my copy today. It seems like there have been a lot of articles about him just being released right about now. This can't be just a coincidence, can it?
Bulletproof, even for invalid HTML? There is such a thing as stretching the standards, but how can the browser be expected to compensate for flagrant user error? You can only bend over backwards so far in an attempt to provide backwards compatibility. If I'm a non-compliant web page writer, how far should I reasonably expect the platform for which I am writing HTML to "do what I meant, not what I said"?
Bottom line: the standards are there for a reason; namely, that a web page written with standards-compliant HTML will render correctly in a standards-compliant browser. Insisting that the browser also render non-compliant code correctly defeats the entire purpose of having standards in the first place; it's just unreasonable.
I'm in Canada, that likely has something to do with it.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
Blake Ross has the Wired cover on his blog.
South Florida teen is co-creator of popular Firefox Web browser
JOHN PAIN, AP Business Writer
Sunday, January 23, 2005
(01-23) 11:21 PST KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. (AP) --
By age 10, Blake Ross was designing Web pages on America Online. By 14, after mastering complex programming languages such as C++, he was fixing bugs in Netscape's Web browser from home, a hobby that landed him a job offer.
"What, at the local store or something?" David Ross remembered thinking when his son told him.
No, at Netscape Communications Corp.
Ross, now 19, a sophomore computer science major at Stanford University, has an even more impressive resume than most of his peers. Before graduating high school, he helped develop Firefox.
Colleagues who worked with Ross only online were surprised when they met him to find "a scrawny 15-year-old kid," recalled Chris Hofmann, engineering director at the Mozilla Foundation.
To take an internship at Netscape during the summer of 2001, Ross moved with his mother to a rented apartment near Netscape's offices in Mountain View, Calif. She drove him to work each morning.
He continued working on the browser on contract after returning to Florida to attend Gulliver Preparatory School. He breezed through computer classes, finishing projects in a day that took others two weeks, said Dean Morell, a former teacher and chairman of the school's computer science department.
Ross soon took on a much more demanding project.
America Online Inc., which bought Netscape in 1999, was trying to resurrect the once-mighty Netscape browser. AOL added features, but they bogged down the software and reduced performance, Ross said in recent interviews by e-mail and at his parents' condo in Key Biscayne, a Miami suburb.
At 17, Ross and another Netscape programmer, David Hyatt, started a side project that became Firefox. They wanted to strip down Netscape and the Mozilla suite on which it is based. By reducing the software to its browsing basics, they figured it would run more efficiently.
Ross and Hyatt created an early version of the browser. Because the project was open source, thousands of volunteers could examine the programming code and suggest ways to improve performance and fix bugs.
"I have fond memories of long nights spent at Netscape just poring over all the feedback people submitted about our programs," Ross said.
Hofmann, the Mozilla engineering director, said Ross dealt with the pressures of Silicon Valley quite well for his age.
"I don't think that he was intimidated or awe-struck at all," he said. "With open-source projects you rise to a level based on your skills. It is really a meritocracy. Anyone who has the skills rises quickly and Blake had all those skills."
AOL ultimately spun off the project and created the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation to develop Firefox and related software.
Hyatt left to design Apple Computer Inc.'s Safari Web browser, but Ross stayed and helped fix Firefox bugs from college.
Firefox was officially released Nov. 9. It was used by 4.6 percent of Web surfers in early January, and that number could reach 10 percent by mid-2005, according to WebSideStory, which tracks browser use. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has dropped to 90.6 percent this month from 95.5 percent in June.
Security experts like Firefox, saying it isn't as vulnerable as Internet Explorer to viruses, spyware and other malicious programs.
Ross has assisted with marketing, helping to place an ad in The New York Times paid for by thousands of Firefox users.
Ross will work with a team on Firefox version 2.0. He also gets calls from venture capitalists and has a startup with Joe Hewitt, another veteran of Netscape and Firefox. He said he can't talk about their work, but he's also interested in writing movies or children's fiction.
The do