Blake Ross

BLAKE ROSS

Networth:$ 170+ million

Place of birth : Miami, Florida, United States of America

Blake Aaron Ross, 24, is an American software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla web browser; in particular. He started the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt, as well as the Spread Firefox project with Asa Dotzler while working as a contractor at the Mozilla Foundation.

In 2005, he was nominated for Wired magazine’s top Rave Award, Renegade of the Year, opposite Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jon Stewart. He was also a part of Rolling Stone magazine’s 2005 hot list. Where he is now on a leave of absence to focus on work. He currently resides in nearby Mountain View, California. Ross is most well known for co-founding the Mozilla Firefox project with Hyatt. While interning at Netscape, Ross became disenchanted with the browser he was working on and the direction given to it by America Online, which had recently purchased Netscape.

Ross and Hyatt envisioned a smaller, easy to use browser that could have mass appeal and Firefox was born from that. The open source project gained momentum and popularity, and in 2003 all of Mozilla’s resources were devoted to the Firefox and Thunderbird projects. Released in November 2004, when Ross was 19, Firefox quickly grabbed market share (primarily from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) with 100 million downloads in less than a year.

Ross now spends most of his time on a new startup with another ex-Netscape employee, joe Hewitt(the creator of Firebug who was also largely responsible for Firefox’s interface and code). Ross and Hewitt have been working on creating Parakey, a new user interface designed to bridge the gap between the desktop and the web. Ross revealed several technical details about the program and his new company when featured on the cover of IEEE Spectrum in November 2006.

Ross is most well known for co-founding the Mozilla Firefox project with Hyatt. While interning at Netscape, Ross became disenchanted with the browser he was working on and the direction given to it by America Online, which had recently purchased Netscape. Ross and Hyatt envisioned a smaller, easy to use browser that could have mass appeal and Firefox was born from that. The open source project gained momentum and popularity, and in 2003 all of Mozilla’s resources were devoted to the Firefox and Thunderbird projects.

Firefox has since been downloaded by more than 200 million people worldwide, threatening the supremacy of even Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer. Although Firefox was ultimately wrought from the work of thousands of programmers in the free-software community—the hive of coders who share and collaborate online—Ross has become a poster boy for the revolution, a role he neither expected nor is comfortable with. People are switching to Firefox at the rate of 7 million per month—most of them from Internet Explorer—because the new browser makes surfing the Web safer and easier. Some call him ”Microsoft’s worst nightmare.” Ross just says, ”I’m more on the side of mom and dad.”

Blake seems like one of those kids who was actually taken aback by his success. He is still quite uncomfortable with the attention that he gets, and being at the top of a developer revolution is not something he is perfectly at ease with.

Even though FireFox remains his best known project to date, Blake is working on something BIGGER. It is not going to be another copy or derivative of a social network…NO. It’s going to be something NEW, FRESH and Innovative.

Watch this space….