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Interview with Firefox Founder and Creator Blake Ross

Below are the answers to the questions some of you submitted a little while ago for Blake Ross, the founder and creator of Mozilla Firefox.

As Opera users we owe a lot of credit to Firefox for successfully bringing more awareness to alternative browsers. We benefited a great deal from it by having less compatibility issues with broken webpages.

There is much work to be done to bring the Firefox and Opera communities closer, there’s no need for the trolling and bickering among our fans. We both make fantastic browsers, strive for standards compliance, and have security as our number one goal.

Hopefully this interview will show the best of what our communities have to offer. I’d like to personally ask to keep the trolling away – let’s set an example here.

Seamus: What have been some of your biggest internal conflicts (great geeky feature compare to a grandma usable browser) in creating Firefox?

Blake Ross: I think complex software results from barreling ahead without challenging the status quo. It seems like everybody I know has trouble finding documents on their computer, and yet Microsoft Word never improves the file picker, perhaps because it’s so mundane that developers overlook it. Most of the frustrations I observe among average users occur in these developer “blind spots.” Inertia is a formidable opponent.

For a browser example, take a look at the JavaScript console. It was added to browsers at a time when developers outnumbered end users and has remained a cornerstone ever since. Does it still belong in 2007, or can we trust developers to install the tools they need? There was a very long debate about that, and you can open the Tools menu in Firefox to see which side won

There is not a menu item, button or checkbox in Firefox whose existence we have not debated at some point or another. Nothing is sacred.

Awz: What do you think about the conflict (among users) between Opera and Firefox? And what should be done, if anything, about it?

Blake Ross: I think it’s ridiculous. Millions of people out there rely on us to make the Web better, not have pissing contests. Let’s just agree that…
Firefox stole features from Opera.
Opera stole features from Firefox.
Opera is a better embedded browser (congratulations on Wii).
Both are fantastic browsers.
Asa is a troll.

…and get back to serving the people.

Jakub81: Which Opera feature (if any) would you like to see in Firefox?

Blake Ross: I’d love to be able to tear off a tab into its own window.

EC: Is there any work in progress to improve the speed of the Firefox browser?

Blake Ross: Yep, performance work has been ongoing since the beginning of the project and will continue indefinitely.

EC: As a former IE turned Opera browser user (I currently use Firefox mostly), the one thing I miss most when using Firefox is Opera’s speed. This lack of speed comes in three forms:

- The startup speed. For some odd reason, it feels like Firefox takes forever to start up, in comparison to other browsers such as IE and Opera. Another related point is the ability to pick up where you left off, without having to save the tabs as bookmarks.

Blake Ross: Yes, Firefox is certainly slower to load than Opera on my computer. This is a price we pay for the layers of abstraction we’ve put in place to rapidly develop across platforms, but Brendan Eich, Boris Zbarsky and others have made significant inroads over the years.

As for picking up where you left off, Firefox 2 supports that feature natively via the Startup settings in the Main tab of the Options window. There are also a host of addons if you want more control.

(Question cont.) - The actual browsing speed. I feel that in order to increase productivity on the web, ease of forward and backward browsing is a necessity. One area that Opera excels in is the backward browsing capability, doing so quickly and efficiently.

Blake Ross: Yes, plenty of work happening here as well. (Actually, since Firefox’s interface is rendered by the Mozilla layout engine, Gecko, page loading boosts often improve application speed, too.) Back and forward have gotten much faster since Firefox launched because we now cache parts of the page in memory, although that of course grows the memory usage. We want to find the right balance.

(Question cont.) - Keyboard shortcuts and Mouse gestures. Another amazing innovation from the makers of Opera. There is no comparison, once again, to the amount of browsing that can be done when making full use of these somewhat necessary features. They are almost a necessity as opposed to a nice feature.

Blake Ross: I agree that these are fantastic features, although I’m not yet convinced they belong in Firefox by default (they are currently available as addons). But customizable keyboard shortcuts is on the “maybe” list for Firefox 3, so you can expect plenty of arguing—I mean, debate

axiom (and Daniel Goldman): In your mind would the Opera browser benefit from being Open Source? And if so, how would you convince Opera Software to make their browser Open Source?

Blake Ross: Yes, I do think Opera would enjoy the benefits of an open-source community, such as fresh developer blood, greater testing assistance and voluntary localization. As for convincing the company to make the move…now that Opera is free, I would hope the internal debate is over why not to open source the browser. I recognize that Opera has already earned a vibrant community, but I think it could expand it even further. I don’t see what the company has to lose.

WildEnte: When the Firefox project started, AFAIK the aim was to create a browser, plain and simple, with the ability to be enhanced using extensions.

I find that this aim has been well achieved. Now Firefox is of course still being developed, but not only in terms of the heart, the rendering engine, or the API for the extensions, or security. I find that with ‘places’, spellcheck and other things Firefox is starting to have more and more features in the standard package. Isn’t this somewhat against the original philosophy of a “browser that can be extended” and going into the direction of what Firefox users tend to call ‘bloat’ in Opera, namely ‘features beyond what’s needed to show a webpage’?

Blake Ross: First, let me douse a subtle spark in your question that goes back to the fighting I addressed earlier: please don’t lump all Firefox users together. My mother is a Firefox user, and I assure you she has never accused Opera of bloat, nor is she even aware that a software product can be “bloated.” We all need to do our part to end this silly religious war.

To answer your question, Firefox was designed to make Web browsing easier and more enjoyable for the largest number of people. This sometimes correlates with feature paucity, but not always. I think spell-checking is a great example of a feature that improves the experience and appeals to everyone without getting in the way. And “Places” is not a new feature but an upgrade of bookmarks and history to bring them into the 21st century.

Simon Houston: What new web technologies are you most excited about and what’s your viewpoint on Opera’s Widgets technology?

Blake Ross: Well, I’m very excited about the new Web platform Joe and I are building with Parakey. That may sound self-serving, but hey, I work on the things that excite me . More generally, I’m excited about technologies that promise to close the gap between the desktop and the Web, because I think most of the fundamental usability problems today lie in that chasm.

Truthfully, I’m not that intrigued by Opera Widgets, if only because every company seems to have a widget platform these days. I’ve never quite understood the appeal of floating clocks (my apartment has a clock) or weather (my apartment has a window) on my desktop. Every holiday season brings a new fad, and it seems widgets are the new desktop search.

Kamalesh: I wanted to pose a question about browser compatibility and/or deprecation by web site designers; i.e., MSNBC now fully supports IE and FF, but only on Windows. No Mac/Linux browser (Opera, Safari, FF) can play videos, flash content or are allowed use of the fly-out menus on MSNBC. Yahoo and others do forms of this, as well.

What efforts can be made by users or browser firms to trend to 100% compatibility…outside of unanswered emails? And do you expect web sites to continue to exclude non-IE user share from their advertisers…seems very anti-revenue (especially since it’s been 10 years since Netscape went away).

Blake Ross: The best I can offer here is that things are getting better as alternative browsers grow and IE improves its standards support. We have a tool accessible from the Help menu of Firefox that people can use to notify us of websites that are broken (whether in function or appearance), and then we reach out to those websites to help them fix the problem.

Things are easier now that we no longer have to appeal to companies to be “better Web citizens,” which was like asking Nestle to promote fruit as a healthy alternative. Now we simply point out that over 90 million people don’t use Internet Explorer, and some of them just might have money to spend on your services.

But some companies still don’t take action even when you give them a fix. I’ll publicly shame one of them here, because it’s been over a year since a user reported it to me: visit the forums of The Charlotte Observer in Firefox. The company claims it can’t reproduce the problem, as if an alert that says “picking up style sheet” is some kind of race condition.

CYH: Now that Firefox has 10 percent of market share and most major sites work in Firefox, it seems that other alternative browsers like Safari and Opera are not benefited (many google/yahoo sites are still broken in these browsers). So does it mean that Market share is the more important than open standards. Should Opera and Safari join forces against the Trident+Gecko party?

Blake Ross: It takes big companies a long time to realize that it’s in their best (i.e. financial) interest to support standards. Same story in every industry. It will happen eventually; give it time.

Sairam: If there was one thing you could change about any Firefox release, what would it be and why?

Blake Ross: I have no idea why the options window was restructured in 1.5. The change disrupted user patterns and outdated every book on the market, with no discernible end-user benefit. I am strongly against shuffling UI around just to make a release feel “new.”

Roseman: Blake, how would you describe the differences between Opera and Firefox? When would someone prefer Firefox? When would someone prefer Opera?

Blake Ross: I think Opera is better geared toward advanced users out of the box, whereas Firefox is tailored to mainstream users by default and relies on its extension model to cater to an advanced audience. However, I see both browsers naturally drifting toward the middle. Firefox is growing more advanced as the mainstream becomes Web-savvier, and I see Opera scaling back its interface, since it started from the other end of the spectrum.

Justin: You haven’t been involved in developing Firefox for a while, concentrating on other projects. However, you are still involved — at least peripherally — from a PR standpoint. Do you plan on returning to work on the Firefox codebase in the future?

Blake Ross: Yes. Joe Hewitt and I have been working on projects that indirectly benefit Firefox, such as Parakey and Firebug, but it’s my New Year’s resolution to return to the Firefox core.

William Chinn: Other than security issues, where is Internet Explorer’s Vista version vulnerable to losing additional market share to Firefox and Opera?

Blake Ross: I haven’t used Internet Explorer on Vista, so I can’t answer this question, but its premise bothers me. This isn’t about market share. I hope my epitaph doesn’t read “Thirteen Point Seven Nine Percent.” If Internet Explorer on Vista is perfect, then we should all happily pack up, because users will be served. I’ll know if that happens because my mother will stop calling. I’m not betting on it.

Gadou: A large part of the Firefox popularity comes from his extensibility. The extension system expand greatly Firefox to a platform (rather than a simple and closed product). Yet, this model occasionally faces some problems for being developed outside the main FF trunk and by other developers: the lower quality ones affect the whole FF (even testing & bug reporting FF is harder when you use one of those), the main FF API evolution break some others (those that have too few developers to release an updated version in time for the FF releases), even for signed extensions, the user don’t know how much Q&A and security auditing are passed, and the whole system lack discoverability (less tech savvy users may miss it)…

What are the plans of the Firefox team to improve the situation ? Specifically:

- Would the FF core developers consider to include the most popular ones (like Adblock, Flashgot etc.) in the main FF trunk?

Blake Ross: We fold into the browser those extensions that are consistent with our mission, which, as I said earlier, is to make Web browsing easier and more enjoyable for the largest number of people. For instance, we integrated the tab drag & drop and spell-checking addons.

Remember that addons are only used by a small fraction of our users, so “popular” is relative and not necessarily relevant to our mission. I think Flashgot is a terrific extension, but I don’t think it belongs in the default build. If we kept folding the most popular addons into the browser, we’d eventually include every addon!

(Question cont.) - Would the FF core developers, at some point, consider helping to maintain the most popular extensions, or enforce Q&A before major FF releases?

Blake Ross: Yes, enhanced stability is a priority in the next version of the Addons website, a project codenamed “Remora” and spearheaded by some freakishly brilliant folks, like Mike Shaver (see this post).

(Question cont.) - Would you consider to implement something that would help the users to choose the extensions that are well maintained and stable?

Blake Ross: Yes, the updated Addons website that launched with Firefox 2 offers this through its Recommended Addons list, and the work continues with Remora.

(Question cont.) Is there a way to improve extensions system discoverability for the mere users?

Blake Ross: We promote addons on the default start page and throughout the Firefox website, but I think we could also unobtrusively suggest addons near related features in Firefox itself.

Jakub81: How would you describe in 3 words each of the browsers below:

- Firefox
Blake Ross: Makes life easier.

- Internet Explorer
Blake Ross: Disband, unite, repeat.

- Opera
Blake Ross: Our best ally.

by Daniel Goldman