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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.'"
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....
It does in Firefox nightly development builds, and it will in Firefox 1.1, which should be out in a couple of months or so.
Of course Slashdot could get a code cleanup before then...
Haven't you been paying attention? Go and Google and you will learn that it was fixed in the mainline long ago, and you will also learn why it wasn't rolled in to FireFox 1.0.
*sigh*
Gee, I wonder what codebase he used to create Firefox, then?
feh. stuff.
This might be band-aiding the situation, but I haven't had to deal with the /. rendering probs since I downloaded the Slashfix extension.
Luckily, other people whore my fix for me these days, but see my sig for a link to Slashfix. And when 1.1 comes out in a few months, this won't be necessary any more as the underlying issue has been patched ages ago.
I've had less trouble viewing pages in Firefox than in any other browser I've ever used. Netscape 4.x was a nightmare, Netscape 6 was only slightly better. IE 5 and 6 had their good points, but still had proprietary functions/attributes that made it not universal (and don't even get me started on the security vulnerabilities). Firefox has been, far and wide, the most compatible browser for me, as a programmer and as a web designer.
At this point, I only test my work in IE because I know some of my users still use it, but that's changing fast.
And they said zombies weren't real!
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.
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?
And completly rewrite the XUL that makes the frontend experience.
Last I checked there is more than just him working on FF. He may have created the fork (and kudos to him) but that's a far cry from the co-author of the entire suite.
First off, it's LARGELY based off the gecko engine [e.g. Mozilla]. Second, there are other FF active developers.
This would be like me forking GCC then when 100 developers get a cool release out of my fork I take credit for it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
...this isn't helping the lives-with-his-mother geek stereotype much.
because slashdot spits out garbage HTML that doesn't fit even the most lax of validation checks.
slashdot's html was written back in 1997ish, and hasn't been updated since.
No, no. That should be: 1) Download Mozilla code and modify it a bit
2) Change the name
3) Change the name
4) Change the name
5) ???
6) Profit!!!
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
How much of a geek genius does it take to do this
Slightly more than it takes to whine about it.
Finkployd
am i the only one who has absolutely no fucking clue what you people are bitching about, even though i use firefox every day to read slashdot?
- tristan
My question for you is why do the Slashbot continually claim that Firefox is so superior when it won't even render their favorite site correctly?
Because, even with this flaw, it's better than IE (the browser that's usually compared against)? I mean, Firefox isn't perfect, but IE is even less, from what I've seen.
If Slashdot doesn't render correctly how the hell can they claim that every site will work "just fine"?
Point me to a post where it has been said that all sites there is render just fine instead of just claiming something you think you've heard.
If their favorite site doesn't render correctly under Firefox do you really think that they are going to believe you when you tell them that it is better?
Depends on what they believe matters more, perfect rendering of Slashdot, or other issues like security problems. Also, Slashdot should render correctly in Firefox 1.1.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Hence it is Slashdot's problem, and not Firefox's. People always say "It's up to the coder to create valid code" - so lets see that rather than whining about a browser that sticks to the standards just fine.
TheHustler
http://www.elmarko.org/ - Useless bilge
http://www.asylum-games.co.uk/ - Co-Founder
It's "Geek Mythology" not "Greek Mythology".
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Some people are successful because of self-gained knowledge and experience as opposed to barfing up some BS they memorized from some bullshit class they attended while half drunk.
Hey, I'm on your side. Go easy. I forget sometimes that I come from a country with state funded university. College was cheap for me. Any money I needed, I could work and my parents could make up the rest. College didnt cost that much and thats even with no grant!!. I know its different in the US - lots of rich kids that are a waste of money and are put into jobs, but I think they are mainly in non-technical areas - studying such subjects as post modern nepotism with specialisation in elitism. You have to remember, in a state funded institution you have very talented, non-rich kids who often don't get the chances they desserve because they are competing with these rich kids.. I'm not sure how it is in the U.S. but where I come from there are often people in the industry who dont desserve it and have no qualifications to prove it. They have no talent aside from professional bullshitting.. I not trying to start a flame war. You are annoyed by the same thing that anooys me, if you think about it. I'm sorry I used college as an example - bad move. I KNOw there are allot of very talenten people of ingenuity that dont go to college and forge their own careers. I cant believe you would assume I was talking about them. I am not..
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.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
This would be like me forking GCC then when 100 developers get a cool release out of my fork I take credit for it.
:P
No, it would be like you forking GCC then, when 100 developers get a cool release out of your fork, the media writes simplistic articles giving you credit for it.
Blake Ross readily admits that he gets too much credit from the media. Read his comments on this blog post if you want to see his take.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." --Newton to Hooke, 5 Feb. 1676;
'Nuff said really.
You may disagree with me, but you have to acknowledge the existance of my highly educated opinion
Hard to acknowledge your highly educated opinion when you spell "existence" wrong...
The Wired cover is available here:
Wired.com
It's posted, just not linked up.
Per Asa Dotzler's blog
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
It doesn't matter whether the HTML is garbage - it should render the same way every time you load it. However, there is a class of bugs in the gecko engine called "reflow" bugs, which only show up in certain situations, based on the timing of various events during page load, which sometimes cause the page to render differently.
This *IS* a bug in Mozilla/Firefox, and it *HAS* been fixed for a long time (since before Firefox 1.0 was released) but the fix was not included in FF1.0 because it broke other things.
For many reflow bugs, you can construct valid HTML that exposes it just as well as garbage "HTML".
My server
I believe so, I have that tape, created in 2000, which documents the launching of Netscape's browser to the open source world, and they document a 14-yr old kid (from Atlanta I believe) who moves to Silicon Valley to work for Netscape, and his mom drives him to work. I'll have to watch that tape again, but I believe it is him.
I hope this kid takes a warning from Chairman Bill and passes up the opportunity to pose for kittenish pix in teen mags.
You and your mum don't even work.
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Depends what you mean by winning. If the new generation of gecko browsers drive MS into upgrading their security, adding tabbed browsing, and a host of other things that the 'others' now do, then really, the war will be won. Some people think the point is to get rid of M$. The truth is, the point is to get better software out there for everyone. And in that sense, Firefox and the others can make this a reality.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."