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« Firefox's Blake Ross at Gnomedex | Main | EU takes another step toward Microsoft fine »
Read on for an extended version of the Q&A with Firefox co-founder Blake Ross that's running in this week's Software Notebook, in Monday's paper. I spoke with him over lunch Friday at Gnomedex in Seattle, and we covered a lot of ground.
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 | Dan DeLong / P-I | |
| Blake Ross, 21, co-creator of Firefox, at Gnomedex last week. | ||
Ross: Yeah, there certainly is pressure. There's pressure on pretty much everything we do right now – the marketing side, the engineering side, because of the initial success of it. People expect us to come up with ever-better Spread Firefox campaigns.
That's especially difficult for us, because the goal of Firefox has always been just to make things simpler, and making things simpler usually doesn't mean adding grandiose new features and making sure that the next version has something that identifies it as being new, which has kind of been the (Microsoft) Office model to date, every release has to have something new so people know they got their money's worth.
Some of the feedback we have gotten about the 2.0 release (test version) has been, what's new here? It looks like the 1.0 release because most of the work that has been going on has been to make it more stable, how do we fix the memory problems that people are complaining about, how do we make everyday tasks easier – like spell-checking, for example, in Web forms. Little things that you're not going to notice when you first fire up Firefox 2.0, but you're going to use it for two weeks and say, yeah, this is definitely an overall better experience.
Fortunately we've become kind of accustomed to complaints from the blogosphere and from geeks, which is generally where this line of pressure comes from. We're pretty good at picking out the points that are important to us and really just letting the others go. I think we're pretty focused on making the experience better, making it simpler, and not focused on making a big splash just for the purpose of making a big splash.
RELATED LINKSBlake Ross' blog. February 2005 Wired cover story. Ross' Saturday appearance at Gnomedex. The "Wheee!" fan-made video that Ross showed at the conference. Wikipedia bio. Previous Q&A with Opera Software CEO Jon von Tetzchner. Microsoft Internet Explorer team blog. From the archives: Internet Explorer GM: 'We messed up.' From the archives: Microsoft, Mozilla: A symbol of cooperation?
Q: I know you're asked frequently about Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's next browser. How much have you used the test version, and what do you think of it?
Ross: I've used it a little bit. The truth is that it actually looks pretty good. People don't expect me to say that, they expect me to say that it's terrible. They did exactly what we were expecting them to do, which was take a bunch of time and get IE7 up to feature parity with Firefox. I haven't seen any real innovation above and beyond what we delivered in Firefox. I think that it's a solid product, but I think that by the time it comes out, we're going to be another world ahead of them again, so I think it's kind of a step or two behind us.
We really are trying to make it less of a religious thing. The whole browser space in general has traditionally been very religious.
Q: Kind of like operating systems.
Ross: Kind of like operating systems, exactly. We're trying to just say, we've all got good ideas in this space. Everyone's talking, for example, about how IE7 is ripping off Firefox. I'm very careful to say that they're matching feature parity. They are ripping off Firefox in a sense, but the truth is that when we started Firefox, we ripped off Internet Explorer because we wanted to make sure that people who migrated from IE felt comfortable in the Firefox world.
If that means copying the interface to some degree, if that means copying some keyboard shortcuts to make sure that people can migrate and feel comfortable, that's what we'll do, and then we can innovate on top of that. I think in general, the community understands that this is kind of a collaborative process. There are always going to be people on the fringes who are just kind of zealots in either direction.
Q: Microsoft essentially allowed Internet Explorer to go dormant for several years, until Firefox started coming along and chipping away at its market share. What do you think about that, and what does that say about the state of competition?
Ross: That makes me furious, to be completely honest with you. That, more than anything is why we really had to start Firefox in the first place. People think that we started Firefox just to take down Microsoft, just to win some kind of competition. Why would we want to win? There's no money involved for us, there's no IPO for this company, it's a non-profit. Why would we want to do this unless there's a real need?
The truth is I think Microsoft is very directly responsible for spyware and adware and the pop-up ads in general that proliferated across the Web after they abandoned their product. I mean, this is the world's most-used software application ever ... and I just think it's irresponsible for a company to abandon it simply because they can't find a financial incentive to continue development on it.
People ask me, "Well, gee, if IE7 is starting to catch up to Firefox, and if they've got their hand back in development right now, and eventually they might actually catch up to Firefox in terms of features, what's the benefit of using Firefox? Why are you guys still around if you say that your only goal is just to make the Web a better place?"
My answer to that is, how much can you really trust a company that five years ago completely left you abandoned? If they do, in fact, succeed in taking back some of the market share that Firefox has gotten back from them, who's to say that they're not going to disappear again? My issue is not so much at a product level, it's at a company level. How do you trust a company that left everyone out in the cold for five years?
Q: Firefox's market share, after growing quickly, has by some measures hit a ceiling or slipped. It depends on which survey you look at. Do you expect to see further growth?
Ross: First of all, you mention that it depends on which survey you look at, and that's an important point, because as Firefox has grown, we've seen a willingness of these surveyors and these analyst groups to put out any kind of headline with Firefox in it. The good story obviously is Firefox breaks 10 percent or Firefox is slowing down. I mean Firefox reaches 14 percent is not an interesting story.
When you start to dig down to the methodology behind some of these, you find out that they're testing something that is not a really representative sampling of the world. The truth is that we have our own internal market share numbers, obviously, that we get through some of our partners like Google and other people that we work with and they tend to be a lot more reliable than a random sampling of 500 Web sites. Our numbers show us growing at a steady rate pretty much since the launch of Firefox 1.0. Same number of downloads per day, on average.
So I think that we're actually continuing to grow at a stable rate. If you look at the press reports that come out over the last year and a half, you're going to find five different firms declaring at five different points of the year that we just hit 10 percent.
Q: Is the ultimate potential reach of Firefox limited by Microsoft's distribution of Internet Explorer as an integrated component of Windows?
Ross: Obviously it is to some degree, I can't claim that it's not. But I think that's much less of a problem in 2006 than it was in 1998 when Netscape was fighting this battle. Because there's a pretty huge difference between something shipping in the operating system vs. having to go to Best Buy and buy it, and the world we live in today, where broadband is obviously a pretty key component of a lot of people's Internet experience. It's much easier and it's much more natural today to download and install software. Firefox is what, 6 megabytes on Windows, that's a 1-minute download on broadband. I think that the barrier to entry for us to get people to download Firefox is much lower than it used to be.
But again, by the same token, we're reaching 12 and 15 percent market share. We've still got a long way to go.
MORE FROM GNOMEDEXPosts and photos from others at the conference. Notes: Day One, Day Two. From the P-I: John Edwards courts tech crowd. Gnomedex official site. Chris Pirillo's blog.
Q: How do you come down on the basic antitrust question (of Microsoft's distribution of Internet Explorer with Windows)? Do you have an opinion on that?
Ross: I cannot imagine getting an operating system today and it not having a Web browser I think it makes sense to have a Web browser available with the operating system. I do not agree with how Microsoft integrated it so tightly with the operating system, because among other things that's a security problem.
But obviously there's a difference between needing a browser available in the operating system and having only one browser ship with the operating system, and having to have us pay to get Firefox shipped with Dell computers, to get shipped with other vendors. So, I agree with the basic concept of having a browser in the operating system. I don't agree obviously with the way that Microsoft stifles the choice of which browser to use.
Q: You're working on a startup with Joe Hewitt, but you seem to be in stealth mode. What can you say about what you're doing?
Ross: I honestly can't say anything at this point -- especially to a Seattle newspaper.
Q: Why especially to a Seattle newspaper?
Ross: Because the people who are most likely to care about the startup are most likely to be reading your paper.
Q: Over in Redmond?
Ross: Yep.
Q: There seems to be a good relationship between Google and Firefox. Where do you see that relationship going in the long run?
Ross: First I should clarify what that relationship is. We've obviously got a search deal, or I should say the Mozilla Foundation has a search deal with Google -- I don't work for Mozilla right now -- and that deal is that if someone uses the Firefox home page, which is Google branded, or if they use the Firefox search box in the top right corner, which has Google installed by default, and then they click on an ad, then Mozilla gets a portion of that ad revenue.
A lot of people think that we sold that space to the highest bidder -- obviously the search box and the home page are prime space in the browser. The truth is that we used Google long before Google had ever heard of us, just because it was the best. If we ever had to we could switch to a better provider because we're not locked in like a Netscape would be locked in to using its own Netscape search engine.
As far as the relationship goes, they've been an incredible partner for us. They featured Firefox on the Google home page for an entire day, which drives more traffic than we could get on our own in probably a year. Obviously their motivations are clear -- they see that IE7 is coming out, it has MSN Search integrated into its box, and this is kind of their play in the browser space. But we're so closely aligned with them in terms of what users want and building good user experiences, that we're really happy to have them as a partner.
Q: How much do you personally work on the Firefox code these days?
Ross: Very, very, very little. Most of my Firefox time these days is spent on the marketing side of things, helping out with the Firefox Flicks contest we just did, helping out with Spread Firefox. To be honest with you, we've got very capable people running Firefox right now, and I am spending most of my time on this startup.
Q: So you're on leave from Stanford's undergrad program, you're 21. Where do you see your career and your life headed from here?
Ross: I think a lot of people, especially in the (Silicon) Valley become cynical about kids stopping out of school -- not dropping out, I'm stopped out of Stanford, it's called -- to work on a startup. I'm not quite as cynical about that. I would not be stopping out of Stanford unless I really believed in what we were doing. It's not a social bookmarking site, it's not another clone of what's trendy these days. I believe that what we're doing is going to be a long-term thing, and so I see myself hopefully running this large company in a couple years' time.
I don't see myself spending my entire life in the software industry, simply because I think that life is too short to do anything for too long. I feel like I've already been in the software industry for a generation now. I've already been doing this for like 12 years already. Actually after this startup takes off, hopefully, and is making a difference, I would like to get into film.
Q: Really? What type?
Ross: I actually have two different kinds of interests – I like to write fiction, and I like to kind of do film editing and production. And so, hopefully I can do the whole Apple software-hardware experience and write the novel and then produce the film out of the novel. But as far as what kind of film, I don't know, anything goes. I like it all, comedy, drama, anything. The amazing thing is that Firefox has actually given me connections into Hollywood, which you would not actually expect to happen.
Q: How does open-source development stack up against traditional development inside a company?
Ross: First of all, I'm not an open-source zealot. I think it's one tool of many, one methodology, and you have to choose the right tool for what you're building. I think it's impossible to claim that open source is inherently better than proprietary software, but I think it's got a number of advantages.
I think the first advantage has nothing to do with the fact that the code is open source so much as the fact that open source projects tend to be much smaller and much less bureaucratic than large organizations. So, for example, if you look at Microsoft, even if there were engineers inside the company who wanted to continue work on Internet Explorer (several years ago) -- which I'm sure there were, because they're not evil people -- they couldn't do it, because the company disbanded the team. If you wanted to work on IE, you could not do that at the company's directive.
Obviously in open source, you have much more control over the lifetime and life cycle of your product, and you can really take it in your own direction. That's been an amazing benefit to us in Firefox, especially after having worked at Netscape for two years, and seeing kind of the junk that went on at that company. So number one, I think open source provides a much tighter-knit community of developers working together, which I think tends to produce better products.
Obviously the fact that the code is freely available has implications in terms of security, because any security expert can review your code, there's no secrets. And you've really got a global community of volunteers working on this project every day. So if you do something that offends some other country, you're going to hear about it from the citizens of that country who work on the product. It's very easy to develop a globally aware product in an open-source community.
The flip side of that is that proprietary companies so far have been traditionally much better at being able to actually get out of the echo chamber and listen to real users. A lot of open-source projects, because they're started by developers for developers -- people scratching their own itch -- tend to end up with very geeky products. They don't believe in marketing, they don't believe in the mainstream. They're supposed to be the anti-mainstream, right, so it's very hard for most open-source projects to break out of that mentality, and I think that we've had some success there with Firefox.
Posted by number.61 at 7/3/06 6:42 a.m.
I completely agree with Ross on his thoughts of IE7. I've been using all betas of IE7 and have been very pleased with the updates. Finally Microsoft got off their butts and made necessary improvements on their browser.
For something that is "so" integrated into their operating system, as they tell us day after day, I was shocked they left it abandon for five years.
Ross is right, Microsoft develop a fantastic release for IE, but can you still trust them? What makes you think Microsoft won't go back to their old tricks if they manage to kill Firefox like they did Netscape in the 90's. It's sad that the only way for Microsoft to act for new releases someone has to start stomping their ground.
Just look at the Windows side. We've had XP for how many years? Now sudden Linux is starting to gain ground and Apple's OS X is killing. How many new released of OS X have we seen. Then suddenly Microsoft comes out with Vista.