Blake Ross

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Blake Ross became a celebrity in early 2005 as the press became interested in the personalities behind Firefox following the success of its 1.0 release. He was featured on the cover of the February Wired magazine as part of their lead story on Firefox's development.
Blake Ross became a celebrity in early 2005 as the press became interested in the personalities behind Firefox following the success of its 1.0 release. He was featured on the cover of the February Wired magazine as part of their lead story on Firefox's development.

Blake Aaron Ross (b. June 12, 1985) is a software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla web browser; in particular, he started the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt, as well as the Spread Firefox project with Asa Dotzler while working as a contractor at the Mozilla Foundation. In 2005, he was nominated for Wired magazine's top Rave Award, Renegade of the Year, opposite Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jon Stewart. He was also a part of Rolling Stone magazine's 2005 hot list.

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[edit] Life

Ross was born in Miami, Florida. He began programming while still in middle school and began contributing to Netscape very soon after it was open-sourced. He worked as an intern at Netscape Communications Corporation at the age of 15, while attending high school at Gulliver Preparatory School, from which he graduated in 2003. Later that year, he enrolled at Stanford University, where he is now on a leave of absence to focus on work. He currently resides in nearby Mountain View, California.

[edit] Firefox

Ross is most well known for co-founding the Mozilla Firefox project with Hyatt. While interning at Netscape, Ross became disenchanted with the browser he was working on and the direction given to it by America Online, which had recently purchased Netscape. Ross and Hyatt envisioned a smaller, easy to use browser that could have mass appeal and Firefox was born from that. The open source project gained momentum and popularity, and in 2003 all of Mozilla's resources were devoted to the Firefox and Thunderbird projects.

Released in November of 2004, when Ross was 19, Firefox quickly grabbed market share (primarily from Microsoft's Internet Explorer), with 100 million downloads in less than a year.

[edit] Other work

While still contributing to Firefox - which recently released version 2.0 - Ross now spends most of his time on a new startup with another Firefox employee, Joe Hewitt (the creator of Firebug). Ross and Hewitt have been working on creating Parakey, a new user interface designed to bridge the gap between the desktop and the web. Ross revealed several technical details about the program and his new company when featured on the cover of IEEE Spectrum in November 2006.

An aspiring writer, Ross is the author of Firefox For Dummies (ISBN 0-471-74899-4; published January 11, 2006).

[edit] External links

[edit] Interviews

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