Back Door

Back Door January 2005 • Vol.5 Issue 1 Page(s) 108 in print issue
Back Door Q&A With Blake Ross

As a boy, Blake Ross used to stay up with his father way beyond bedtime to play PC adventure games. Now, he’s embarking on a wholly different kind of computer adventure, one that could rattle the foundations of the entire industry. The 19-year-old Netscape expatriate is a Stanford undergrad by day and, by night, the key force behind Firefox, the Mozilla-based browser that debuted its 1.0 version in November. Even in beta, Firefox scored millions of downloads, and the heat under the browser just keeps increasing.

CPU: What brought you to Netscape at age 14?

Ross: I initially started as a summer intern and then moved to a contractor position that allowed me to work during the year (just terminology differences, really). I wish I had some brilliant story about how a kid from Miami ended up working at a company at the other end of the country, but it really all just began when I started wondering one day whatever happened to Netscape 5.

CPU: Did you have an ‘in’ at Netscape, or did you just apply off of some bulletin board?

Ross: It had been awhile since Netscape 4 had been out . . . and being the insanely geeky kid I was at the time (not any more, of course), I liked to be on the cutting edge of everything. So I did a search for Netscape 5 and ended up at www.mozilla.org. I read up on this open-source thing and started in the modest way that most everyone else does—by using the product and filing bugs in the public database. Then I turned to development work, and some people at Netscape noticed the work I was doing on some key bugs that were blocking their release at the time, so they offered me an internship. I didn’t have any ins. I met everyone over the Internet.

CPU: How long were you with Netscape?

Ross: Hmm . . . it was such an on-again, off-again relationship, and it’s hard to remember now. I worked out there for three straight summers, and also a bit during the year. I think it was over the span of three years.

CPU: What did you get out of your time there, both from technical and ‘career’ perspectives?

Ross: Netscape was really an eye-opening experience. Looking back, I can’t say it was the best introduction to the software industry. But it may also have motivated me to start Firefox, something I might not have done otherwise if I hadn’t left with such a bitter taste in my mouth. Basically, Netscape was frustrating because the people running the show had dollar signs on the brain, and it was completely hindering their ability to really leverage the opportunities we had in terms of regaining browser share.

CPU: How so?

Ross: From a technical perspective, I can definitely say I met some of the brightest people I know at Netscape. And by and large, those are the people that have worked on Firefox with me. But to be honest, there were also some of the most incompetent people I’ve met so far at Netscape.

There was so much emphasis on ‘monetizing’ the browser that focus completely shifted away from actually making a browser people enjoyed. My favorite example of this was pop-up blocking. The Netscape releases were based on the Mozilla codebase, and the Mozilla codebase had pop-up blocking. Here we had this technology that cured a problem that plagued so many Internet users and that people everywhere were speaking out against. IE had no pop-up blocking and no plans to implement it at the time. So what did Netscape do? Well, in their first release, they removed it entirely. We had all the technology we needed and a huge opportunity and they just completely axed it, all because Netscape/AOL Web properties used pop-ups!

After much public consternation over the decision, they finally added the technology to a point release. But even then, they added an exceptions feature, and added all of the AOL/Web properties to it. So here they were advertising ‘Netscape 7.1 with Pop-up Blocking,’ and yet the default start page was www.netscape.com, which threw a pop-up and was on the exceptions list. So the very first thing a Netscape user saw when he started the new browser was a pop-up. Users see right through this sort of thing.

Not to dwell on this point but another example: Netscape shipped with a feedback form that allowed users to submit suggestions and problems. Interacting directly with our users was something that really excited and motivated me, and I was often at Netscape Building 21 until 2 or 3 in the morning responding to these users to thank them for their feedback and help them fix their problems. This was overtime work that I wasn’t getting paid for, but it sparked controversy because our PR department wanted to be able to approve every response I sent out. You just can’t have a strong relationship with your users if you’re going to treat them as revenue streams and nothing else.

It was decisions like this again and again that just killed me . . . and there was growing dissent among some of us in the organization that were just so frustrated to see them. It was so easy for the public and the media to criticize ‘Netscape’ for the decision, but it wasn’t really ‘Netscape’ as a whole. Engineers inside the organization fought tooth and nail against brick wall management. What was so frustrating was that I started off the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed kid in a candy store, and by the time I left Netscape I was just like . . . wow.

CPU: So after AOL welcomed you to the machine, then what? How do we get from there to Firefox?

Ross: Firefox began life as a simple fork of part of the Mozilla codebase. Since the code was in the directory ‘mozilla/browser,’ it was known cleverly as ‘m/b’. (Some would pronounce it ‘embee’.) It was a small side project that David Hyatt and I began working on while still at Netscape. The basic principle was to design a small, light, fast browser with a laser-sharp focus on the end user. One of the guiding principles was that there would be a very small team of people working on it. We felt that one of the other major problems at Netscape, besides the management, was actually the sheer volume of people working on the product, which (contrary to common sense) actually hindered the development—too many cooks and all that.

CPU: When did you and David start this work?

Ross: It started in late September 2002.

CPU: Where did the name Firefox come from?

Ross: We named it Phoenix for its first public release since it was ‘reborn’ from the ashes of the Mozilla codebase. Then it went through a series of name changes for comical copyright reasons.

CPU: What exactly is Firefox, and how does it differ from Netscape/Mozilla?

Ross: Netscape/Mozilla is kind of this monolithic suite of very tightly integrated applications. They contain a browser, a mail client, a Web page composer, and, in Netscape’s case, an AIM client. Originally, Phoenix was characterized as ‘just the browser portion of Mozilla,’ but this has never really been the case. From the first release, Phoenix has always offered a different feature set and a different user interface than Netscape/Mozilla.

Phoenix was created to be more of an end-user browser. Mozilla was created to be an everything-for-everyone browser because at the time, the Mozilla Organization was in the business of creating technology to give to other vendors so that they could prepare it for end-user consumption. They didn’t communicate directly with most of the Web population; they were usually at least one degree away.

Today, Firefox (and other standalone applications such as Thunderbird for mail) has become the primary development focus for the Mozilla Foundation because they’ve shifted directions and are now targeting end users directly.

CPU: Would you say that the all-in-one approach for Mozilla failed?

Ross: The irony is that Firefox has surpassed Netscape in number of downloads, and Netscape now promotes itself as ‘based on Mozilla’ whereas in the past, Mozilla would pride itself on being the basis of Netscape. I wouldn’t say it failed, but I just think the Firefox architecture makes much more sense. We’re able to offer a browser that caters well to a large segment of the population, and then we offer extensions so that people who want more can literally build their own dream browser with a few clicks.

CPU: When you say ‘build your own browser,’ I think of requiring at least midlevel programming skills and modifying and recompiling code.

Ross: Extensions are add-ons that can either implement new features, modify the behavior of existing features, or even hide existing features. Firefox offers an extensions architecture that’s simple in two ways. It’s simple for developers to use, which is why we have over 200 superb extensions today, and it’s simple for users to use because all they have to do is click Install and Firefox does all the rest automatically. So it’s really a point-and-click interface to add all kinds of cool new stuff for our users.

IE supports extensions too, but its architecture is much more complicated than ours, which means there are few add-ons available, and users aren’t sure how to use them. Also, I’m not sure IE has a passionate community of users that would leverage such an easier architecture even if one did exist. I think what it really all comes down to is that Firefox users are always able to be on the cutting edge of the Web even between our official releases because there’s this energetic development community that never stops innovating.

CPU: How do you get your parents to adopt Firefox? (Besides that they’re your parents, of course.) What’s there to persuade the average end-user?

Ross: I think our most compelling marketing is really just word of mouth. We’ve got a solid product that helps cure some of the problems that most people are experiencing—viruses, spyware, security exploits, etc.—and people are telling other people that they really need to get this thing. I think the nature of the word-of-mouth varies depending on the group. We’re getting a lot of users switching because an authority figure (ISP, corporate IT department, or influential columnist like Walt Mossberg) tells them to. Once they start using it, they just find all this other great stuff to enjoy. Then we’re getting a lot of other users who are switching because friends, family members, or other people they trust are telling them about their great experiences. For example, here at Stanford, there’s all kinds of buzz about Firefox. It’s become one of the ‘cool’ things to be associated with, like file sharing. (But you didn’t hear that from me.)

CPU: Why is Firefox more secure than IE?

Ross: It’s more secure simply because security has been at the forefront of all Mozilla developers’ minds from the very beginning. You have Tony Chor, IE program manager, coming out on the IE team blog and saying that user experience and compatibility were prioritized over security in the early days of IE, and that they’re just now beginning to figure out how to make the thing secure. It’s very hard to go back and add security after the fact. It really has to be in your mental framework from the start.

All browsers are going to suffer security exploits. I think the better question is how the various vendors respond to such exploits. We often manage a 24-hour turnaround time for patches once exploits become public, and we recently started a Bug Bounty program. We want to find the bugs in our program so we can fix them for our users as quickly as possible. There are still some serious vulnerabilities in IE that remain unpatched, leaving its users at risk.

CPU: If you had to pick your favorite three competitive feature advantages for Firefox, what would they be?

Ross: Hmm. I’d probably say tabbed browsing, the Find bar, and the extensions capabilities. But that’s against IE for Windows XP. For IE on earlier Windows versions, I’d have to say that one of our best competitive advantages is pop-up blocking. Microsoft left its older users out in the cold with that technology.

CPU: Where does the financing come from for this project?

Ross: The [Mozilla] Foundation began with seed money from AOL and other investors like Mitch Kapor, and there are other revenue streams, as well, such as deals with corporations and merchandise purchased at the Mozilla Store. The [Mozilla] Foundation is a nonprofit organization.

CPU: What do you stand to make out of Firefox personally besides fame, glory, and chicks?

Ross: Well, I’m still waiting for all of those . . . but beyond that, this is really all about living out a dream that kept getting stifled. We’re making a product that really affects and improves the experiences of millions of people, and it’s something of a personal triumph to finally have reached that. Naturally, I hope that Firefox will be the beginnings of a career in the software industry, and not the end.

It’s nice to see innovation in the browser space again after so long, and I don’t just mean in Firefox. We’re not just creating this in a vacuum. We seem to have spurred a movement at Microsoft to start moving IE forward again, which means the bar will once again start moving up for all Web users. We welcome that.

CPU: Looking forward, how do you hope that Firefox will influence the world of computing?

Ross: I hope it will remind the software industry that they’re designing for the world at large, and that computers are still very foreign to most people. Companies like Google are doing an exceptional job of this already. I also hope Firefox will debunk the myth that you need an enormous marketing budget and a ton of resources to succeed. All you need is a good product, and your users will do the rest for you. We hope to mobilize the open-source community and refocus their efforts on the end user and help them recognize the importance of marketing to the end user. Open-source software and end-user software are not diametrically opposed.

by William Van Winkle

William Van Winkle began writing for computer magazines in 1996. He was first published in 1990, the same year he took his first job in computers. He and his family live outside of Portland, Ore.