Firefox, Linux, Inc., and Media History
The old media can’t tell any story without looking for an angle. They like controversy, of course. I had one journalist ask me once for an interview to try to stir up some controversy with another journalist, and when I refused, he said that was the only story he was interested in. And there is an article today about Firefox with the headline, “Teen is co-creator of Firefox browser.” I couldn’t tell if they meant that as a compliment or a dig, but it’s a cute angle, when you consider that Firefox is spreading like, well, I have to say it, like wild fire and continues to cut into IE’s share of the browser market.
Far more interesting to me is Blake Ross’s blog, the guy in question, where he talks about his vision for what he wanted Firefox to be and what he thinks is the reason for its success:
You’d be hard pressed to believe it with the ongoing media circus, but Firefox has humble origins in a product that—if everything went as planned—was designed to be invisible to the person using it. I remember sitting on IRC with Dave, Ben and Asa painstakingly debating feature after feature, button after button, pixel after pixel, always trying to answer the same basic question: does this help mom use the web? …