Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt started Firefox as a side
project while working at the Mozilla Foundation.
They were working to revive the struggling Netscape
browser, but became frustrated by the constraints
imposed on them. So Ross and Hyatt decided to build
a browser that they would actually want to use.
Working in their spare time, they began developing
a new browser that was fast, simple, and reliable.
In 2002, they launched the initial version, called
Phoenix, and in 2004 they released Firefox 1.0, which
was an instant hit.
...

as a way to work on the browser that we knew we could make if we weren’t
being controlled by marketing, sales, and all these other influences inside
Netscape. It started off with just three or four of us—the people who had
always been fighting these battles within Netscape to make the right decisions
for users.
For example, we wanted to include pop-up blocking in Netscape 7. It would
have been the first mainstream browser to include pop-up blocking. The
Mozilla folks had all the code ready, but Netscape wouldn’t include it because...

which is actually the Chinese name for a red panda.
Livingston: Were the Firefox developers all in different places?
Ross: When we first started doing it, we were all at Netscape. Then Dave left to
go to Apple to work on Safari, and we had some other folks like Ben Goodger
from New Zealand, Pierre Chanial from France, and Jan Varga from Slovakia
come on board. I went back to Miami, and we continued to work together
online.
Joe and I still collaborate through IM on Parakey, even though we’re about
20...

Ross: No, but the users we were getting weren’t really the target audience;
these were people that downloaded beta builds from Mozilla. So it was still a
geek audience. We had to transform the culture at Mozilla because it was all
based around open source ethos, which says programmers are kings, marketers
are sleaze, and everyone else can read the manual. All the branding for Mozilla
looked very Communist—the logo was a dinosaur and the banners ads were . . .
I can’t even describe it, but very odd, technical kind of imagery that...

Ross: Not a bad thing, but you have to deliver. It’s hard to under-promise and
over-deliver when everyone’s promising things for you. We’re trying not to hype
up what we’re doing until we’ve got something people can use. People expect
the world, so if you hype up what you are doing, you have to deliver, and it’s
not easy.
Livingston: Did any competitors ever do anything to anger you?
Ross: Not directly. The only thing that bothers me is that Microsoft seems completely
driven by competition. We tried to be driven entirely by...