Born in 1985, Blake Ross was the son of a psychologist and lawyer. He had a great upbringing and took an interest in software development. He continued down this road and graduated from Stanford in 2003. He completed his first project which was a website at the young age of 10 and continued on to create small video games. Blake started working for Mozilla after college and had the idea of making a user-friendly web browser. He began working on this idea with a co-worker, and they released the first version in 2004 which was called Firefox. Firefox grew quickly, with users loving how easy it was to use and surpassed 100 million downloads.
The driving force behind Firefox was Ross’s mother becoming frustrated with Internet Explorer and wanting something easier to use. Ross took this to heart and eventually granted his mother’s wish.
At it’s peak, Firefox was used by 33% of Internet users, behind Chrome and Internet Explorer. It continues to be used but only by about 9% present day. It is so cool to see a young man see a small issue his mother has, and take it upon himself to solve it.
This is a very interesting story. Ross definitely figured out how to make a seemingly frustrating process – using web browsers – much easier. I never realized Firefox had such a large following at one point. I have always used Safari and Chrome, so the 33% was rather shocking!
Even though Firefox isn’t on the same level with Chrome and even Bing, it is cool to see how someone as young as Ross was still able to develop a sophisticated web browsing program with millions of users.
I too, am frustrated with internet explorer and it continues to be a problem. Firefox is a great, fast explorer by passing the alternative to the default internet explorer
Firefox was, like many successful companies, born out of necessity. In this case, it was his mother’s need for faster internet. This is a great example of finding a problem to fix, not making one up.
I never knew the story behind Firefox but also had no idea it was used by 1/3 of people on the internet at one point. This entrepreneur so a problem within the system and found a great way to profit while also fixing peoples problem.
Hearing the story behind Firefox is spectacular. This entrepreneur shows the true entrepreneurial spirit when his mother presented him with a problem and he decided to do something about it and solve the problem at hand.