Firefox celebrates its’ 5th birthday this week and only five years after its’ shaky launch the browser has grown to become the main rival to Internet Explorer, reducing IE’s market share from over 90% at the start of the decade to below 40%. But Firefox should never have been, with a teenage developer, a parent company developing another brower and the shear might of Microsofts’ Internet Exporer all stood in its way
Phoenix
Blake Ross, the then 19 year old developer of Firefox, was born into an educated family in Miami, Florida; his mother a psychologist and his father a lawyer. However despite this education his parents were not especially computer literate and frequently need his help to accomplish simple tasks. It was this frustration and confusion on the part of his parents which encouraged Ross to teach himself how to author code, beginning with HTML, when he was 10 years old and moving onto more advanced languages. This is not to say his parents were dumbfounded by computers; Ross developed his interest in computers though playing video games with his father.
Firefox began life not as a new product but as a redesign of the established Netscape browser. By the late1990’s the browser war between IE and Netscape was over, Netscape had lost and was rapidly loosing market share to its rival. In a disprate attempt to combat this Netscape released the code to its eponymous browser to the public under an open source licence in 1998. The “Mozilla Project” was created soon after to mange the development of this open source software. In 2000, at the age of 15, Ross began volunteering with the project, contributing his coding skills and time. His skills and commitment came to the attention of Netscape/Mozilla; they offered him an internship in their in Californian Mountain View offices which he began in the summer of 2001. However Netscape was not in a strong market position; it had just been acquired by AOL for $4 billion dollars and there was suspicion that the Mozilla Project could be shut down by the new owners.
Netscape
During his placement the 16 year old Ross worked on Netscape 6, which was launched towards the end of the “browser wars” in 2000/2001, and Netscape 7, both of which failed to gain any prominence in the market. Ross himself likened them to something that was “coughed up” , stating;
“…it was frustrating to have our names on the product that was getting released” said Ross speaking at the time. And the industry agreed; The New York Times gave this advice to its readers; “download the program (Netscape 6)…only if you meet all the (minimum) requirements…and (have) a belief that almost anything is better than a Microsoft victory in the browser war.”
Thus Firefox was born out of a need, identified by Ross, for a slimmed down user-friendly browser. Indeed the first release of Firefox was based on a stripped-down version of the Netscape browser. This was not a logical this to do at the time, IE’s market share was increasing backed by the release of IE6 and Windows XP in 2001, while Netscape’s own releases were not being received well by the media. To further complicate the matter Ross, himself, was to end his summer internship and begin studying in Stanford University.
After Thought
Ross describes working on the new browser as an “after thought” for its first year; writing code after work or while at home. This is not to suggest that they acted slowly, as early as September 10th 2002 Mozilla announced the build specifications of the Phoenix browser. During this period Ross, and a small number of colleagues, restricted Netscapes’ access to the code and between them began crating the Phoenix browser. Ross showed that he knew what the market wanted, and Mozilla agreed; in April 2003, only a few months from after they began creating Firefox, Mozilla announced they would be concentrating their efforts on the, as yet unreleased, browser. It was then another 18 months after this announcement that the first version of the Firefox browser was released, in November 2004.
By taking decisive action to protect their foetal product and by seeking a partner that shared their vision Ross and Hyatt showed great leadership skills especially when one considers they were actively competing against Mozilla, which only had 15 employees at the time (Dotzler 2008), to create a rival product. It must also be noted they were somewhat lucky when The Mozilla Foundation was released from Netscape that the Foundation continued to support the browser.
SpreadFirefox.com
If developing Firefox was difficult promoting the browser was going to be an up-hill battle. To communicate the benefits of Firefox to a mass audience Ross, with Asa Dotzler, began Spreadfirefox.com a viral advertising site for the browser. The site acted as a means to coordinate Firefox volunteers and advertise the application. In July 2003, in a marketing event initiated by users of the site, SpreadFirefox.com received enough donations, $200,000, to take out a 2 page advertisement in the New York Times. Through the site Ross encouraged the very users of the application to advertise it. The site, and the sites users, organised several promotional tasks including asking computer publications to donate advertising space or dropping banners over the Danish Parliament. “Instead of just being developer-only, like most open source projects…we (wanted to) leverage… every kind of talent”. While viral and social web marketing is commonplace these days, Spreadfirefox.com was an innovative and risky in 2004.
By 2005 Firefox was already creating waves in the industry in February 2005 Bill Gates, when asked about Firefox, stated that Microsoft was working on a new version of their own browser.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
