FireFox Sets the World Ablaze
By Jeremy C. Wright, Staff Writer
Monday, 22 November 2004 11:14 EST
Blake Ross, a Stanford sophomore, is perhaps one of the most influential people in his school at this very moment. In fact, in the world of technology, he could well be one of the most influential people in the world.
Blake is the man leading the push behind the increasingly popular Mozilla FireFox browser. Working through the Mozilla Foundation, Blake and his team have recently launched the browser to compete directly with Microsoft’s incumbent Internet Explorer browser.
Currently, the incumbent isn’t feeling very nervous. With more than 90 percent of the market, IE is feeling fairly comfortable, as nearly any incumbent would. But the tides might be changing, and as with a flash flood, sometimes the tides of technology change alarmingly quickly.
How does the young leader of a revolution deal with it all?
Although the process has certainly been exhausting, Ross said he is eager to witness his creation take full flight.
"It's exciting because open-source software hadn't really taken off until Firefox," Ross said. "Other open-source products were more for techie people and weren't really developed for the user."
Ross started working on building "a better" browser while other kids were just getting hooked on instant messenger. He worked on the earlier versions of Netscape at the age of 14 and eventually interned for the company following his freshman year of high school.
Although he enjoyed the experience, Ross found working at Netscape to be somewhat frustrating.
"Larger open-source companies usually have a group of 50 people making decisions on the interface," Ross said. "Basically, if someone wants to have something in the software, they'll include it. There's no review process. So a friend of mine – David Hyatt, who now works at Apple – and I started to work on an experimental browser based on the Netscape code."
That browser became Phoenix. Which became FireBird. Which became the phenom that we have today, Mozilla FireFox. Used by 10 million. Loved by millions more.
"I think Microsoft is getting a little nervous," Ross said. "They aren't sleeping anymore. They're talking about us on their Weblog and have started to contact the press about us."
Prof. Mendel Rosenblum in the Computer Science Department said he thought that Mozilla presented an interesting challenge for Microsoft.
"Browser innovation at Microsoft proceeded very rapidly up to the point they sufficiently crushed Netscape, and then it totally stopped," Rosenblum said. "Having a good open-source browser that appears to be evolving very quickly exposes Microsoft to the risk that Mozilla will get good enough to start luring folks to it."
If anything, Ross just wants to see a better browser available for the general public. He noted the dissatisfaction with Internet Explorer among his colleagues and peers and said he believed Internet browsing could be faster and more efficient.
The focus on consumers instead of the competition may be the one thing that could save the project. Because the team is small and they move quickly, they have been able to redefine the way people use the browser in small, in small simple ways – ways that put people farther and farther from Internet Explorer as they desire more and more abstract utilities such as tabbed browsing and download managers.
The flexibility of the FireFox team is likely what will save them, and it’s definitely what is causing Microsoft to take notice. The product hasn’t yet hit its “sweet spot” and when it does, the fear inside Microsoft is that it may go from a “paltry” 10 million users to a massive 50 million users, practically collapsing Microsoft – and many of its visions for the future – in one swift move.
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