Teen Helps Build Firefox Web Browser

Blake Ross started helping developing Firefox when he was still in high school. I just cannot get over that. By age 14 he was learning C++ and was fixing bugs in Netscape’s Web browser, which was a hobby for him. via Yahoo! News:

“Ross, now 19, a sophomore computer science major at Stanford University, has an even more impressive resume than most of his peers. Before graduating high school, he helped develop Firefox. Colleagues who worked with Ross only online were surprised when they met him to find “a scrawny 15-year-old kid,” recalled Chris Hofmann, engineering director at the Mozilla Foundation.

To take an internship at Netscape during the summer of 2001, Ross moved with his mother to a rented apartment near Netscape’s offices in Mountain View, Calif. She drove him to work each morning.

He continued working on the browser on contract after returning to Florida to attend Gulliver Preparatory School. He breezed through computer classes, finishing projects in a day that took others two weeks, said Dean Morell, a former teacher and chairman of the school’s computer science department. Ross soon took on a much more demanding project.

America Online Inc., which bought Netscape in 1999, was trying to resurrect the once-mighty Netscape browser. AOL added features, but they bogged down the software and reduced performance, Ross said in recent interviews by e-mail and at his parents’ condo in Key Biscayne, a Miami suburb.”

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