The Birth of the Firefox Web Browser in the Netscape Family

Last year was a breakout year for 20-year-old Blake Ross. He was on the cover of Wired Magazine, nominated for Wireds' Renegade of the Year and named to Rolling Stone magazine's Hot List. This came six years after he started working at Netscape as a developer – at age 14.

Blake co-founded the Firefox project and also co-founded SpreadFirefox.com. The Firebox browser has really grown online and actually 'encouraged' Microsoft to upgrade its old IE6 browser. He now is the author of the new book "Firefox for Dummies".

Greenlee: You worked at Netscape many years ago. What was that like?

Blake: I started working at Netscape, and really the Mozilla project before that, when I was 14 years old. Because Netscape is based on this open source project, I was working with a lot of engineers at Netscape and they kind of liked the work I was doing and offered me an internship during the summer. I'm not sure they realize how old I was at that point. I said I was a student – I think they thought a college student—but it became pretty clearly when I got out there and my mother was dropping me off at work everyday. I worked at Netscape for two or three summers in Mountain View, CA. To be honest with you, the first summer was a great first job for someone my age, but it kind of went down hill from there. I was at Netscape after the AOL takeover.

Greenlee: What motivated you from your Netscape experience to create Firefox?

Blake: If you've ever talk to someone who worked at Netscape during the Golden Period, it was a very different time back then. When I was there, it was managed by AOL, Netscape.com was kind of the focus of the company, this portal, and the Netscape browser was just this vehicle for driving traffic to the Netscape.com portal. We were trying to create a solid, end-user browser that my mother could configure very easily, get on the Web, get her work done without her having to think of browser settings, viruses and that sort of thing. It was very hard to realize that vision within Netscape since they were all about the portal and the bottom line.

Greenlee: You started to create Firefox while at Netscape?