Posted on 01/23/2005 7:18:06 PM PST by Flavius
KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. - 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.
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"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 downside of his success: "All my computer science professors are expecting straight A's, even in classes that have nothing to do with the Internet," he said.
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.
___
"...but the benefits..."
I agree. My criticism aside, I'd never go back to IE - too bloated and insecure (oops, I may have just described myself there).
I've been using Firefox now for two weeks, and I am very impressed with it. Nice, fast, its a good product. I'm really enjoying open source right now. I just finished re-writing a core component of Mambo (an open source cms) to improve and customize its function. One of these days, I really ought to learn programming, but right now its just too much fun winging it.
How ironic that his website is down.
http://www.blakeross.com/
Besides, people who want Firefox-like functionality in Internet Explorer can download the powerful Maxthon shell program, which not only adds tabular browsing and a number of Firefox-like features but also adds quite flexible and powerful ad-blocking capabilities through the AD Hunter function. Why do I have this feeling that Microsoft may just buy out the rights to Maxthon soon?
Browser Wars, take two
various FR links | 12-22-04 | The Heavy Equipment Guy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1306815/posts
...and let your compiler of links drop out of Lurk & Link mode for comment and advice:
Ditch IE. Honest to God, almost anything else will give you fewer problems. Try and compare- use IE, then run Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy... then try another browser and repeat. You will be stunned at the garbage IE attracts.
Keep your OS updated & patched.
Run a hardware firewall-- with today's LAN's, it's easy. You need a hardware firewall.
Use a software firewall, too-- if you don't, you'll never know how many times your PC is trying to "phone home" and send your info across the web.
Firefox ping, you Big Fire Sky Fox. (Just trying to get your attention, Big Sky Guy.) :-)
I saw a documentary on the downfall of Netscape on PBS about 4 or 5 years ago and a good portion of the last half hour of the hourlong episode was devoted to this kid.
That issue is known and they are working on it.
ping
"That issue is known..."
Thanks for the info.
Last November, Microsoft IE product manager Gary Schare told BetaNews, "We think that getting the first set of early adopters is a lot easier than getting the next set, and then crossing over into the mainstream is pretty difficult." But Firefox is refusing to relent, garnering up to 270,000 downloads per day.
In the past month alone, Microsoft's IE market share has dropped 1.5 percent, according to WebSideStory, while Firefox has picked up a full percentage point. In an interview with BetaNews, Firefox architect Blake Ross said he expects the browser's growth "to remain vibrant as more and more people learn about Firefox and tell their friends and family members."
Before Firefox's official launch, the Mozilla Foundation started the Spread Firefox campaign to get the word out about the browser it calls a faster and more secure alternative to Internet Explorer.
To herald in the 20 million download mark, Firefox team member Asa Dotzler told the 63,000 Spread Firefox members, "You all have demonstrated that open source community can be powerful, committed, and capable of accomplishing once-unimaginable feats."
"Today, we celebrate twenty million Firefox 1.0 downloads. But more than that, we celebrate the community that you all have built and we celebrate each and every one you," said Dotzler.
The only real problems I encounter is momentary slow downs and lock ups of FF when pages with Flash or Java are loading. The lockups can last anywhere from one minute or more. Never had that happen with IE.
I'm running Firefox on Windows, it runs much better on my Windows Machine than it does on my Linux (Debian) box.
I rarely use IE any more, and avoid IE like the plague for anything that requires a secure connection.
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