As more and more people are born, the history of search engines becomes less and less known since Google has become the end all be all of most discussion on the topic. However there was a time when many different browsers were fighting for superiority over the early stages of the web. Interestingly enough internet explorer has always seemed to be terrible as in 2003 the frustration of having to use internet explorer led him to discovering and contributing to Netscape. However after sometime working on Netscape, Ross became unhappy with the project largely due to influence coming from AOL. At this point Ross was left with two choices, work on a project he dislikes or to adapt and create something new.
Given that this article is about innovation it comes as no surprise that Ross decided to develop something new and groundbreaking. Ross co-founded the Mozilla project with all of their focus going into the Firefox and Thunderbird (an email client that would go on to be big in it’s own right) projects. At only 19 years old, Ross released the Firefox browser and captivated many users getting over 100 million downloads in less than a year. Some of the more commonplace features in today’s brewers were developed an integrated into Firefox such as add blockers and tabbed browsing.
Overall, Ross’ journey is one of finding a source of frustration and deciding to innovate and create a solution to the frustration. Perhaps the most insane part of Ross’ story is that all his work on the early stages of development of his web browser were done when he was a teenager while his competitors who developed Google did so when they were in grad school. However the biggest lesson to take from this whole article is that Internet is such a problem that it inspired a 16 year old to start development on a browser that would outdo it in record time.
I feel like this story is a perfect example of innovation, especially when seeing this success born from pure frustration. Its also very impressive for someone so young to be working on such a big project!