Yes indeed, Firefox was written by a teenager in his parents' basement, where the servers that ran Netscape's web portal were also kept. This story is everywhere, often repeated verbatim by reporters who'd rather write than research. The Blake Ross Myth is fascinating because of its social aspects, not because of its truth. You have to wonder whatever became of Ben Goodger, the media darling in the Firefox Before Blake era.
Here's what a conscientious reporter would say about Blake: Firefox began as a skunkworks project at Netscape. Blake was one of a handful of programmers who worked on it. It's probably fair to say he was one of two people who spent the most time on the project, the other being David Hyatt. Firefox languished for a while, then took off after the Mozilla foundation sprang from Netscape's ashes in the AOL pyre. Blake returned some time after, and worked on Firefox full-time for about nine months up until just about the time 1.0 shipped.
Blake's a nice guy and everything. He really did work on Firefox, as did and do many other people. He deserves some credit for getting it off the ground. The Myth of Blake as The Guy was created by a reporter who I think wanted to play up the angle of the youngest Firefox programmer. I forget the reporter's name. He must have written a good story. The media have had a fascination with the youngest Netscape or Mozilla programmer ever since Stuart Parmenter in the days of Code Rush. Anybody remember that one? You can still buy the video.
By the way Ben works for Google now. He is still the Firefox UI owner and still writes code for Firefox. Blake and a partner run their own little incorporation, working on some secret software project that's rumored to be related to Firefox, but isn't Firefox. He recently began writing code for Firefox again after a year's hiatus. I believe he's taking time off from school at the moment. David works for Apple, where he is probably the most visible member of the Safari team. Stuart works for Oracle on another project that's distantly related to Firefox. David Baron races balloons across the Pacific Ocean, and was recently spotted in a South Korean music video. Johnny Stenback builds snow castles for homeless Scandinavians, and Scott MacGregor was last seen by a couple of snowmobilers, armed only with a ping pong paddle, hunting for the yeti that got drunk and toppled his house. I swear it's all true, except for some parts I made up. All good reporters do that.
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050418 Firefox/1.0+
3.0 
.......................NAH 
extremely unethical and ripping off webmasters.
