Blake Ross with Firefox logo on PC.
Being rich is not my biggest concern right now.
Since its launch late last year, Firefox has received high praise for its speed and ease of use.
Amidst all that good news, the second-year Stanford University student didn’t seem to care much and was still focused on developing a new version of this application.
At the age of 7, Ross was interested in computers and began learning programming when he was 10 years old, starting with designing websites at AOL.
So Ross and his mother packed up and rented an apartment in Silicon Valley near Netscape’s offices.
In 1999, AOL acquired Netscape.
AOL tried to revive Netscape by adding all sorts of features, but all were ineffective and only made the speed slower and consumed more processing power.
Ross and Hyatt continue to pursue open code development in design (This allows anyone to inspect the source code, suggest ways to increase performance and fix errors, unlike Microsoft
Chris Hofman, Mozilla’s director of engineering, said older programmers were impressed with Ross’s coding talent.
After that, Hyatt left the project to work on the Safari browser for Apple, and Ross went to college while continuing to support Firefox development when others took over Mozilla.
Some security experts have recommended that Internet users use Firefox because it is less susceptible to viruses and spyware attacks than Internet Explorer.
According to WebSideStory, a news site specializing in tracking the use of browsers, as of early January 2005, Firefox had won 4.6% of the global web browser market and forecasts that this rate could increase to 10%.
However, Ross understands that as Firefox’s popularity increases, hackers will also begin to pay attention to it and the security risks will grow.
Ross said he hasn’t made any money from the browser, but Google, Amazon and a number of other companies have profited through the search engine boxes they sponsor for Firefox.
When asked that being famous and published in newspapers must have made him the dream man of many girls, Ross grinned and said: They have nothing attractive to me.
Phan Khuong (according to USA Today)