Meet The Co-Creator of Firefox

Jay Langhurst writes "Learn more about the roots of Firefox and about the 19-year-old who co-created the browser in this article. '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.'"

Uhh...wow?

[Minority Opinion]

How much of a geek genius does it take to do this:

1) Download Mozilla code
2) Change the name and turn off several features in the Makefile
3) ???
4) Profit!!!

Re:But...

[Fnkmaster]

Luckily, other people whore my fix for me these days, but see my sig for a link to Slashfix. And when 1.1 comes out in a few months, this won't be necessary any more as the underlying issue has been patched ages ago.

And not making a brass ra zoo

[ThinkPad760]

Just think, If every 19 year old did and internship and produced something of this quality by the time they were 19 and still being driven to work by mum and not colecting royalties. Someday, bloody someday.

Real or figment of media's imagination?

[Sanity]

I often wonder whether Blake Ross' involvement with FireFox is accurate and fair to other people involved, or whether it is a creation of the media in love with the notion that a 19 year old could go up against Microsoft and win.

Does anyone have a good understanding of the actual role Ross played here and whether the media reports are being fair to other contributors by focussing on him?

Re:Uhh...wow?

[MindStalker]

And completly rewrite the XUL that makes the frontend experience.

Re:Uhh...wow?

[tomstdenis]

Last I checked there is more than just him working on FF. He may have created the fork (and kudos to him) but that's a far cry from the co-author of the entire suite.

First off, it's LARGELY based off the gecko engine [e.g. Mozilla]. Second, there are other FF active developers.

This would be like me forking GCC then when 100 developers get a cool release out of my fork I take credit for it.

Tom

You know...

[keiferb]

...this isn't helping the lives-with-his-mother geek stereotype much.

Re:Strange how often it works out that way

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how the IE team feels knowing that an intern who had to share an apartment with his mom and have her drive him to work basically outperformed their entire team.

I wonder how the mozilla team feels knowing that an intern who had to share an apartment with his mom and have her drive him to work basically took all the credit for their entire communities work.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:But...

[OmniVector]

am i the only one who has absolutely no fucking clue what you people are bitching about, even though i use firefox every day to read slashdot?

Re:But...

[Jugalator]

My question for you is why do the Slashbot continually claim that Firefox is so superior when it won't even render their favorite site correctly?

Because, even with this flaw, it's better than IE (the browser that's usually compared against)? I mean, Firefox isn't perfect, but IE is even less, from what I've seen.

If Slashdot doesn't render correctly how the hell can they claim that every site will work "just fine"?

Point me to a post where it has been said that all sites there is render just fine instead of just claiming something you think you've heard.

If their favorite site doesn't render correctly under Firefox do you really think that they are going to believe you when you tell them that it is better?

Depends on what they believe matters more, perfect rendering of Slashdot, or other issues like security problems. Also, Slashdot should render correctly in Firefox 1.1.

Re:But...

[bunratty]

My question for you is why do the Slashbot continually claim that Firefox is so superior when it won't even render their favorite site correctly?

Believe me, Internet Explorer has worse bugs than Firefox does. It's just that nearly every web developer tests their site very thoroughly in Internet Explorer, and most will go to great trouble to work around IE's many bugs. That's why sites look better in IE than in Firefox, even though Firefox is inherently superior. As bugs get fixed in Firefox and as more web developers test their sites in Firefox, this situation will improve.

Re:Uhh...wow?

[starwed]

This would be like me forking GCC then when 100 developers get a cool release out of my fork I take credit for it.

No, it would be like you forking GCC then, when 100 developers get a cool release out of your fork, the media writes simplistic articles giving you credit for it. :P

Blake Ross readily admits that he gets too much credit from the media. Read his comments on this blog post [mozillazine.org] if you want to see his take.

standing on ye shoulders of giants

[sjf]

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." --Newton to Hooke, 5 Feb. 1676;

'Nuff said really.