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.'"

Comments

Strange how often it works out that way

[Weaselmancer]

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.

Re:Strange how often it works out that way

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please, quit it with the hero worship. He didn't outperform the Internet Explorer team at all. He took the existing Gecko rendering engine and slapped a lightweight shell on the front.

Firefox development is hardly without its problems or questionable decisions. They switched from a good looking, professional default theme to an ugly, unfinished one because they couldn't be bothered to check up on the licensing issue (the theme creator had no problems with relicensing it to meet the Firefox needs).

They broke the extension API multiple times while encouraging people to give it to newbies in its pre-1.0 unstable state, even going so far as to put it on the Mozilla front page in favour of the actual Mozilla suite. Newsflash: telling newbies to uninstall extensions, delete directories, etc just to upgrade is not acceptable.

They made important UI changes in-between the release candidate and the final 1.0 (do they even know the meaning of "release candidate"?) including such usability cock-ups as changing some keyboard shortcuts from positive actions to destructive ones (when I want to open something in a new tab, I don't expect to get my bookmarks deleted!).

They left a really annoying bug in 1.0 - the Slashdot bug - that affects their "early adopters" that are responsible for recommending this browser to other people. That's a marketing disaster that only seems to have been mitigated by people spreading FUD that it was a bug in Slashdot's code not Firefox's.

I like Firefox. I use it as my primary browser. But all along, I have been shocked at how many boneheaded, unprofessional decisions have been made by the lead developers. I haven't observed this incompetence in other browser developers (except for Internet Explorer, of course), and it is not a good sign for the future quality of the Firefox browser. The Mozilla suite developers might not have had their priorities in tune with everybody else, but they didn't screw up anywhere near as often as the Firefox decision makers.

Co-creator?

[northcat]

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.

Re:Real or figment of media's imagination?

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

Blake's involvement is definitely being overhyped for the "college kid takes on Bill Gates" aspect, as both he and everyone else at the Mozilla Foundation will be quick to acknowledge. He did play a central role in getting the Firefox project started--but along with Dave Hyatt, who is now a developer for Apple's Safari browser. (Surprised we don't hear as much about Hyatt's role in the story?)

I think if there's one person who really deserves credit as "the guy behind Firefox," it's Ben Goodger, UI nazi and lead developer from 0.7 onwards. After all, as Firefox is mostly just a UI gloss on the underlying Mozilla code, it's Ben's rigorous adherence to principles of good, clean, simple UI that has made Firefox the breakaway success that the Suite never was.

But really that just emphasizes how much Firefox depends on the entire Mozilla project, with its thousands of sometime developers and probably a few dozens of real core superstars. That's the real story here, but so far the media has chosen not to cover it.

Re:But...

[Matt Perry]

Slashdot still doesn't render correctly in FF...

That's because slashdot's HTML still doesn't validate. Even though people have fixed the markup it hasn't been incorporated into slashcode, either because no one has submitted patches or no one in charge cares. I'm surprised that the slashdot people haven't gone ahead and incorporated the changes themselves since it seems it would 1) help their street cred to have a site so focused on standards and computing to actually follow standards and 2) help them save bandwidth to use stylesheets more and get rid of the junk markup like font tags.