Seattle PI has an interview on their Software Notebook with 21-year-old Blake Ross, the founder of Firefox. He makes some really good points throughout the interview a few of which I will discuss and give my opinion on in this post. For those of you that don’t know, Ross launched the Mozilla Firefox project in 2002 with fellow software developer Dave Hyatt. While I’m only 23 myself its good to see how people close to my age are making an impact in the industry. Of course Ross’s resume is much better than mine, but I can still relate to a lot of the points he makes in the interview.
The first question describes pressure in making Firefox 2.0 much better than Firefox 1.0. The key point he makes here is that they just need to make things easier to use for the user. This is something that Apple does very well in their desktop products and Google does in their web applications. This is important in getting people to change what they are already used to doing. Another good point he makes is that the launch doesn’t have to have a slew of new features it just needs to be a progressive step better than the previous product.
When asked about IE 7, he says they have a pretty good product. I feel the same way about the product. Sure there are a few things that don?t seem to work the way they should from a developer point of view, but the product has come a long way since IE 6. They have made an attempt to catch up with the features of Firefox, but in any case Ross feels that they will always be a step or two behind Firefox.
Ross makes a huge statement saying the it was unacceptable for Microsoft to let Internet Explorer go for 5 years. He says they are responsible for adware and spyware and pop-up ads. He goes on to say that he cannot trust a company that will do that to its users.
As far as his concern for market share, the surveys out there tend to be inaccurate at times. Ross says they pull numbers from Google and it tends to be a little more accurate due to a larger pool of data. He says they are happy with steady growth. I think that will be the key to gaining market share. Slow and steady growth over a longer period of time will be much more beneficial for Firefox.
Ross goes on to say that he is working on a startup project that is in stealth mode with developer Joe Hewitt. He doesn’t give much detail and this is expected. He should be keeping it a secret until it is launched or at least in beta mode.
Ross says their relationship with Google is good and their company philosophy is very similar to that of Firefox.
Ross is on leave from Stanford. I can understand that. With the large projects on his plate it would be difficult to attend school at the same time especially at Stanford. It’s also good to see that he has other interests besides programming. It makes people more well rounded in the industry. I think that’s important that people have more than one focus in life. It’s what makes them interesting.
