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.
Like a lot of things described in this book, Firefox was something new. It
was an open source project run like a startup, both in the concern for the end
user and in the attention paid to marketing. The results were impressive:
Firefox has cut into the formerly overwhelming market share of Internet
Explorer, and dominates among technical users.
In 2005, Ross took a leave from Stanford University to start a startup with
fellow Firefox developer Joe Hewitt.
Livingston: Tell me about how Firefox got started.
Ross: Firefox grew out of Mozilla, which itself has a very long history that I
won’t go into now. I personally started working on the Mozilla project in 2000.
It was open source; anyone could work on it. I started working closely with the
Netscape team, because they were basing their product on Mozilla. I was helping
them fix bugs, and they invited me out for an internship one summer, so I
went out to Netscape, which was a pretty cool first job.
Livingston: You were only 14, right?
Ross: Right. I worked out in California, and it was great the first summer. Then
I started working from home, and when I came back the next summer, things
had gotten much worse. Netscape kept sliding further and further in the
market. At this point, they had something like 5 percent market share. This is
post-AOL, post–browser war and all that. Things got a lot more desperate when
AOL tanked and started to demand more revenue from the browser. They
wanted a return on investment, and they’d bought Netscape for about $4 billion.
So the browser started to turn into nothing more than a vehicle to drive
people to Netscape.com. There were search buttons everywhere, advertisements
everywhere. It was a mess. The culture didn’t focus on users. It was
painful to be working there.
Firefox was more a response to our experience at Netscape than to the
dominant browser, Internet Explorer. Explorer had basically been abandoned
at that point; in 2001, Microsoft disbanded the IE team. So we started Firefox

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