asp.net 2d barcode generator Blake Ross in Font

Drawing Data Matrix in Font Blake Ross

Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt started Firefox as a side project while working at the Mozilla Foundation. They were working to revive the struggling Netscape browser, but became frustrated by the constraints imposed on them. So Ross and Hyatt decided to build a browser that they would actually want to use. Working in their spare time, they began developing a new browser that was fast, simple, and reliable. In 2002, they launched the initial version, called Phoenix, and in 2004 they released Firefox 1.0, which was an instant hit. Like a lot of things described in this book, Firefox was something new. It was an open source project run like a startup, both in the concern for the end user and in the attention paid to marketing. The results were impressive: Firefox has cut into the formerly overwhelming market share of Internet Explorer, and dominates among technical users. In 2005, Ross took a leave from Stanford University to start a startup with fellow Firefox developer Joe Hewitt.

Livingston: Tell me about how Firefox got started. Ross: Firefox grew out of Mozilla, which itself has a very long history that I

won t go into now. I personally started working on the Mozilla project in 2000. It was open source; anyone could work on it. I started working closely with the Netscape team, because they were basing their product on Mozilla. I was helping them fix bugs, and they invited me out for an internship one summer, so I went out to Netscape, which was a pretty cool first job.

Livingston: You were only 14, right Ross: Right. I worked out in California, and it was great the first summer. Then I started working from home, and when I came back the next summer, things

had gotten much worse. Netscape kept sliding further and further in the market. At this point, they had something like 5 percent market share. This is post-AOL, post browser war and all that. Things got a lot more desperate when AOL tanked and started to demand more revenue from the browser. They wanted a return on investment, and they d bought Netscape for about $4 billion. So the browser started to turn into nothing more than a vehicle to drive people to Netscape.com. There were search buttons everywhere, advertisements everywhere. It was a mess. The culture didn t focus on users. It was painful to be working there. Firefox was more a response to our experience at Netscape than to the dominant browser, Internet Explorer. Explorer had basically been abandoned at that point; in 2001, Microsoft disbanded the IE team. So we started Firefox as a way to work on the browser that we knew we could make if we weren t being controlled by marketing, sales, and all these other influences inside Netscape. It started off with just three or four of us the people who had always been fighting these battles within Netscape to make the right decisions for users. For example, we wanted to include pop-up blocking in Netscape 7. It would have been the first mainstream browser to include pop-up blocking. The Mozilla folks had all the code ready, but Netscape wouldn t include it because Netscape.com had a pop-up ad. Those kinds of decisions were painful, and it was frustrating to have our names on the product that was getting released. So we started a project called Phoenix, which was supposed to be an allusion to the mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes. It was like the project was being reborn from the ashes of Netscape.

Livingston: Who was involved Ross: David Hyatt, Joe Hewitt who is now my partner on a new startup,

Parakey and I were on the development side, with Brian Ryner and Asa Dotzler providing build and QA support. The project was like an afterthought for the first 6 months to a year, something we worked on at Denny s after work. I went back home to Miami, and we worked on it online for a while. Phoenix was basically a fork of the Mozilla code base that we controlled. We closed off access to the code, because we felt it was impossible to create anything consumer-oriented when you had a thousand Netscape people in search of revenue and a thousand open source geeks who shunned big business trying to reach consensus. We just wanted to close it off and do what we thought was the right thing. We went through a couple name changes, Mozilla offered us more support, and that s kind of how it all got started.

Livingston: What were some of the other names Ross: It started off as Phoenix, and we quickly encountered trademark issues. It

was just the three of us, we weren t lawyers, and we were broke, so at that point we probably would have done anything someone asked of us. In this case, Phoenix Technologies complained because they had some kind of web browser, too. We renamed it Firebird, because it s the same imagery, but there was an