Founders at Work.pdf

396 Founders at Work
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
as a way to work on the browser that we knew we could make if we weren’t
being controlled by marketing, sales, and all these other influences inside
Netscape. It started off with just three or four of us—the people who had
always been fighting these battles within Netscape to make the right decisions
for users.
For example, we wanted to include pop-up blocking in Netscape 7. It would
have been the first mainstream browser to include pop-up blocking. The
Mozilla folks had all the code ready, but Netscape wouldn’t include it because
Netscape.com had a pop-up ad. Those kinds of decisions were painful, and it
was frustrating to have our names on the product that was getting released. So
we started a project called Phoenix, which was supposed to be an allusion to the
mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes. It was like the project was being
reborn from the ashes of Netscape.
Livingston: Who was involved?
Ross: David Hyatt, Joe Hewitt—who is now my partner on a new startup,
Parakey—and I were on the development side, with Brian Ryner and Asa
Dotzler providing build and QA support. The project was like an afterthought
for the first 6 months to a year, something we worked on at Denny’s after work.
I went back home to Miami, and we worked on it online for a while.
Phoenix was basically a fork of the Mozilla code base that we controlled. We
closed off access to the code, because we felt it was impossible to create anything
consumer-oriented when you had a thousand Netscape people in search
of revenue and a thousand open source geeks who shunned big business trying
to reach consensus. We just wanted to close it off and do what we thought was
the right thing. We went through a couple name changes, Mozilla offered us
more support, and that’s kind of how it all got started.
Livingston: What were some of the other names?
Ross: It started off as Phoenix, and we quickly encountered trademark issues. It
was just the three of us, we weren’t lawyers, and we were broke, so at that point
we probably would have done anything someone asked of us. In this case,
Phoenix Technologies complained because they had some kind of web browser,
too. We renamed it Firebird, because it’s the same imagery, but there was an