PALO ALTO, Calif. – Blake Ross is sprawled in a chair at a coffee shop near Stanford University, his long legs, clad in baggy Tommy Hilfiger jeans, stretched underneath the table. He looks like any other college student who happened to stroll off campus.
Yet as much as Ross blends in with the Stanford scene, the 20-year-old has also become a standout in the technology industry. At age 17, he helped create the Firefox Web browser, which has since grown into the biggest threat to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer since the Redmond, Wash., company battled and defeated the Netscape browser for Internet supremacy.
Now three years later, Ross has dropped out of college to build an Internet software company – just as Bill Gates, whom Ross is often compared to, did to start Microsoft Corp. His goal is modest, motivated by his mother and 81-year-old grandfather: to make software less clunky, more people-friendly. And it’s clear he possesses at least the vision and technical skill to pull it off.
“I don’t see the point in making software if you’re not making software that people like to use,” Ross said. “I think people feel responsible for their failings with the computer, but it’s really not as easy as it could be.”
As a child, Ross was a voracious reader. Before he had turned 10, he created a Web site devoted to the popular “Goosebumps” book series. At age 11, he designed his first Internet-based software, a simple online game called the “Scrambler.” He then moved on to create an online version of tic tac toe.
By the time Ross, a Miami native and the youngest of three siblings, had started high school, he had stumbled across a project calling for volunteer developers to help design Netscape’s latest browser. He began by reporting bugs, then suggesting how to fix them. At the end of his freshman year, when he was 14, he was hired as an intern at Netscape. He moved to Mountain View, Calif., for the summer with his mother, who drove him to work each day.
Despite the age gap, he fit right in. “We all acted like teenagers,” said Joe Hewitt, a 22-year-old developer at Netscape at the time and now Ross’ partner for their startup. “I think that’s the secret in the software industry. It’s like a frat house in a way. (And) as long as you have the technical proficiency, nothing else really matters.”
But over time Ross, who also worked on a contract basis during the school year, and a small group of developers became increasingly frustrated with Netscape’s direction with its browser. So Ross and another engineer, David Hyatt, now at Apple Inc., decided to start a Web browser project on their own time. They took the code that had already been written, copied it and started tweaking it, stripping it of complicated features and simplifying it.
Calling the project Phoenix at the time, they aimed to create a consumer-friendly browser, which, among other features, could block out pop-up advertisements and viruses. Soon others joined the cause. They hashed out details during midnight outings to a local Denny’s.
Now, since Firefox launched version 1.0 in November, its share of the Internet browser market has climbed to 7 percent, according to WebSideStory, which tracks the industry. Microsoft’s share, meanwhile, has fallen from 95 percent to 89 percent in the past year. More than 75 million copies of Firefox have been downloaded, and hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts have rallied around the Firefox cause.
With the rising number of Firefox users, most of them average, non-techie Web surfers, Firefox could also face an overwhelming demand for technical help, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. Though Firefox is produced by the Mozilla Foundation, the unit that Ross worked for that has since spun out of Netscape into a nonprofit, the browser is largely a product developed and maintained by volunteer software engineers.
“I don’t think a handful of volunteers can handle that kind of support load,” Enderle said.
Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s community coordinator, concedes that Mozilla underestimated demand when it released Firefox 1.0 in November. But Mozilla has addressed those problems and is fully prepared for the widespread launch of Firefox 1.5 this fall. “It’s our No. 1 priority,” Dotzler said.
Ross’ energies have shifted since he started attending Stanford as a freshman in the fall of 2003. By then, the Firefox project had amassed support from developers around the world, and became the flagship product of Mozilla.
At Stanford, Ross juggled Firefox on top of courses in computer science and creative writing, his other passion. During his first quarter, he blew away the other 150 students in his computer science class and was asked to come back as a teaching assistant.
The year Ross took the course, Stanford computer science lecturer Jerry Cain gave his students “the hardest (exam) I’d given in the five years I’d been teaching,” he said. Ross “scored better than I would have if I had taken it.”
But school, Firefox and Firefox-related book deals, speaking requests and media interviews took their toll. He pulled a lot of all-nighters, was often holed up in his dorm room and didn’t get to experience a full college life.
Ross also had begun thinking of his next project, a startup in which he and Hewitt could call the shots. Timing was essential. “Firefox might not have happened at the most convenient time for me, but it happened,” he said. “Now is the time people are willing to listen to what I have to say next.”
Ross, a sophomore, dropped out of Stanford in April, though he plans to return as early as this fall. It was a difficult decision for his parents, but they are “supportive 100 percent,” said Abby Ross, his mother, who is so proud she sports a Firefox license plate on her PT Cruiser. “Of course I want to see him go back,” she said. But “everybody is telling me, “Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.”‘
Ross is mum on the idea behind the startup. Something to do with Internet-related software and solving software’s problems, he teases. He and Hewitt, a 27-year-old who dropped out of college to work at Netscape, are hunting for office space, employees and investors. They have secured funding from Sequoia Capital, the same venture capital firm that seeded Yahoo Inc., Apple Inc. and Oracle Corp.
He also imagines a day in the future when he won’t be focused singly-handedly on software. He plays the piano, enjoys Broadway musicals like “Les Miserables” and “Jekyll and Hyde” and dreams of writing a screenplay someday, both a comedy in the style of “Old School,” the comedy starring Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn, and something else “with meaning.” Or else children’s fiction, a fantasy along the lines of the popular “Harry Potter” series. Or a television sitcom.
“It’s a chance to break free of the very rigorous and structured style of coding, and just write anything,” he said. “I don’t have too much time for (it) right now.”
Incidentally, his Firefox project has opened a few doors to his dream of screenwriting. One of the producers of the “American Pie” movies, a Firefox fan, flew him to Los Angeles, took him to a private cigar bar (“Jean-Claude Van Damme was at the next table”) and introduced him to a screenwriter. And he had lunch with an actor who will star in the thriller “Pulse,” about students who discover an evil Web site, and who wanted to meet a young tech wizard. (“I didn’t know if I should be flattered or not,” said Ross, who eschews the geeky, techie stereotype.) The actor plans to wear a Firefox T-shirt in the film.
“It was a very surreal to be in the company of these people,” Ross said about another encounter, when he attended a red-carpet gala alongside Donald Trump, Martha Stewart and Nicole Kidman. “The next day I went back to coding.”
Coding, that is, and getting the startup off the ground and preaching the gospel through the Spread Firefox movement. Even his grandfather, who sports a cap reading “I’m Blake’s Grandfather,” has gotten into the spirit.
Developing Firefox is now largely carried out by a growing team of designers at Mozilla and volunteer engineers. One who has taken up the cause is 17-year-old Zach Lipton, a senior at San Francisco’s University High School, who began contributing to the project at the age of 12. An intern at Mozilla this summer, he has developed programs to test Firefox and make sure it operates as it’s supposed to.
“I’ve been jokingly called the next Blake Ross, but I don’t see myself following in his footsteps,” Lipton said. Nevertheless, Lipton plans to study computer science in college and go on to develop some sort of consumer-oriented software. “I look up to what he’s done and think it’s great,” he said.
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(c) 2005, Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.).
Visit the Contra Costa Times on the Web at http://www.contracostatimes.com.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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AP-NY-08-10-05 1558EDT
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