After working for Netscape at age 14, Key Biscayne resident Blake Ross has become at the ripe old age of 19 the co-creator of a hot, new ultra-fast Internet browser, Firefox.
With its official version released just last month, Firefox has been downloaded more than 11 million times and is already the world's second-most used browser, though it is still far behind the preeminent Internet Explorer of Microsoft.
The free Firefox is hot because it works faster than Explorer and seems less prone to viruses, experts say. "Microsoft's worst nightmare, " Business 2.0, a tech publication, called it. The publication dubbed Ross a "software prodigy."
On Wednesday, a two-page ad touting the browser appeared in The New York Times, paid for by 10,000 supporters who shelled out $10 to $30 each.
All 10,000 names appeared in the ad, including many from the Ross family. "He is taking all this in stride and is so unaffected by it all!" wrote his mother, Abby Ross, in an e-mail to The Herald. "Daily he is bombarded with venture capitalists, book proposals, reporters, etc."
He's a graduate of Gulliver Prep. Mother Abby is a clinical psychologist. Father David is a litigator with Greenberg Traurig.
His grandfather, Stanley Kolber, 81, wears a baseball hat with a Firefox logo and the words: "I am Blake's grandfather."
FINDING HIS FIELD
"I just got into this gradually, " Ross said Thursday, home for the holidays from Stanford University, where he is a sophomore.
The youngest of three children, he had his first claim to fame - and first appearance in The Herald - at 7 when he was named the winner in the kid's division in the Sensational Roach Art Contest at Parrot Jungle. His entry was Roach Perot - a photo of the billionaire Ross Perot pasted to the head of a dead roach.
At 8, he and his father, David, used to play computer games in their Pinecrest home. His first favorite was King's Quest. At 10, he wrote a simple program for America Online using Visual Basic.
"I'm pretty much self-taught, " he said.
At 14, he stumbled upon an Internet discussion of Netscape, the first big-time browser that was eventually eclipsed by Explorer.
AOL had bought Netscape and tried to promote it, but eventually it made the browser "open code, " meaning that its programming was available to anybody, and anybody was able to alter it - unlike Explorer, the innards of which have been jealously guarded by Microsoft.
Ross began offering improvements online, and Netscape officials were impressed. After his freshman year in high school, he was offered an internship. For the next three summers, his mother took an apartment in Silicon Valley and Blake went to Netscape's offices daily. Eventually, several people working on Netscape, including Ross and a programmer named David Hyatt, decided that AOL was making a mess of the browser.
"It was a huge embarrassment. A very heavy clunky browser, " Ross said. "Basically me and David Hyatt decided to do a little experimental project." The idea was to create a new browser from scratch and not tie it to e-mail and many things that Netscape wanted to include.
That project became Firefox. After a while, a department within Netscape, Mozilla, broke off as independent nonprofit organization to develop a browser that would give people an open-source alternative to Explorer.
Mitchell Baker, president of Mozilla, said Hyatt led the way in arguing for a completely new browser, but "Blake was one of the very early and very active ones working to develop a small, fast, quick browser."
A LULL, THEN THE GOODS Apple Computer, wanting a competitor to Explorer, hired Hyatt away to develop its own browser. "For a while things got a little quieter, " Baker said. "Hyatt left. Blake started college." But other volunteers were working on the project, and Mozilla hired one of them, a New Zealander, Ben Goodger, to be the lead developer for the last year-and-a-half. "But Blake has continued to be a significant contributor."
Reviewers like Firefox because its programming code is simpler than Explorer's.
The latest Firefox version, which came out last month, has drawn raves. "The faster, better web browser" was the verdict of Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal's tech columnist. The browser already is being used by about 6 percent of Web surfers, according to some monitoring services, surpassing Opera and Netscape but well short of Explorer's 90 percent, or 600 to 700 million users.
Ross, like the other Firefox volunteers, doesn't profit from the browser, but he is developing for-profit ideas. He and Netscape-Firefox veteran Joe Hewitt "have a little startup. We're still in a brainstorming mode, so we don't want to say too much."
