Teen Helps Build Firefox Web Browser
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. "What, at the local store or something?" David Ross remembered thinking when his son told him. No, at Netscape Communications Corp.
[Download Firefox Here]
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.
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.
[Download Firefox Here]
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