Founders at Work.pdf

Blake Ross 397
open source database already called Firebird. So we renamed it again. At that
point, it was fairly popular—though not nearly as popular as it is now—so we
wanted to keep the “Fire” part of the name. We just went through Fireanything
names for a couple of months, and somebody came up with Firefox,
which is actually the Chinese name for a red panda.
Livingston: Were the Firefox developers all in different places?
Ross: When we first started doing it, we were all at Netscape. Then Dave left to
go to Apple to work on Safari, and we had some other folks like Ben Goodger
from New Zealand, Pierre Chanial from France, and Jan Varga from Slovakia
come on board. I went back to Miami, and we continued to work together
online.
Joe and I still collaborate through IM on Parakey, even though we’re about
20 minutes apart, because we’re so used to that environment from Firefox. It’s
just so much faster to collaborate online than it is for him to drive down to me
or me to drive up to him.
Livingston: Were there any conflicts with Dave working at Apple?
Ross: Yes. They were also making a simple end-user browser, and he was not
really supposed to be working on a competitor to that. It wasn’t on our end that
we had a problem.
Livingston: Did he leave Apple?
Ross: No. He still works on Safari right now. He did Firefox and then went off
to Apple.
Livingston: So then it was just a few of you.
Ross: The Firefox team is always changing. It’s not fair to say there are just a
few of us, because we’re based on Mozilla, which obviously has dozens of developers,
and there are a lot of developers working on Gecko, the core layout
engine. The Firefox team itself—the people worrying about everything wrapped
around the engine and working on the separate fork of the code base—was
always about four or five different people for the first year.
Now there are a lot more, obviously, because it’s the main source tree. All
those people that were working on Mozilla now work on Firefox.
Livingston: What was the first turning point when you knew you were really
onto something?
Ross: I think it was when we put out our first milestone, which wasn’t even . . .
We put it on an FTP site and had an article on mozillaZine, which is a community
news site. It was already getting as many downloads as a Mozilla milestone.
On the one side, you had a lot of Mozilla people—the hardcore developer
types—who didn’t like what we were doing, because focusing on “mom and
dad” is heretical in much of the open source world. Then there were a lot of
people who were saying, “Finally, Mozilla is stepping away from its geek roots
and doing something more mainstream.” We got a lot of coverage early on from
bloggers and PC World and stuff like that. It got out of control pretty quickly.