Ben Goodger didn’t invent Firefox. Nobody did. But he was the lead engineer for the alternative Web browser and as responsible as anyone for naming it. Goodger, 27, is a short-sleeved software engineer at Google in Mountain View, with a 1960s ranch house in Los Altos Hills.

THE LIGHTBULB: Firefox was the result of several people coming together and saying, “We have this great platform and we really want to make the most of it and the only thing that’s not decided yet is will we work together as a team and make this happen.” That was the start. I was in New Zealand doing my school work, and working as a volunteer.

I didn’t have Internet access at home because it was expensive and we didn’t have a lot of money. I lived with my mother, who works as an accountant. I would occasionally be able to get Internet access at her work. I was around 17 when I thought, “Maybe I’ll try building a Web site.” It seemed like it wasn’t too difficult. I could just read stuff. I would build it at home and then go into work with her when she had to work late and I would sit there at a computer and upload it.

When I was a second-year student in the engineering department at the University of Auckland, I discovered the Mozilla Project. It is the organization whose goal is to foster the open-source development of what at that time was the Netscape code. I had a Web site that I maintained myself. I switched from one hobby to the next and was volunteering in my spare time, contributing some of my ideas to the Mozilla code.

Several of the engineers at Netscape noticed my work and out of the blue comes an e-mail from someone who works at this big Silicon Valley company, saying, “Would you like a job?” I was quite stunned. I was 19 at the time. I came up here to work for a few months and extended it to a year. I went back to New Zealand and finished up my degree so I could qualify for an H1-B visa. I was here for two or three months and then promptly laid off by Netscape, along with most of the browser folk.

The Firefox icon is a picture of the world with a fox with a flaming tail wrapped around it. That’s what people see on their desktops. Firefox traces its roots back to the Netscape Navigator, which became incredibly popular because it was distributed free to anyone with an Internet connection. Then Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer and began shipping it with Windows. That’s been the default experience for Web browsing for most people since.

Firefox is designed from the point of view that it tends to want to keep harmful content out. Firefox gives you an incredibly customizable foundation that you can build an interesting browser on. If you hate pop-ups, you can block pop-ups. Basically you can customize the browser in all these interesting ways. You can change the look of it entirely. It doesn’t cost you anything. In terms of market share, Firefox ranges between 10 and 15 percent of the U.S. market, to much higher percentages among tech people.

It was a joke for a while that Firefox would change its name every three months. It turns out to be an incredibly difficult task to find a name that isn’t trademarked by somebody. We spent about a month just sitting there. A good friend of mine was going through the dictionary, being facetious. He said firecatch, firefox. I said, “Wait, that sounds good.” He said, “I was just kidding.”

My web page is called Millennium. I don’t know why. You can punch it up at Bengoodger.com. That will get my blog, which is just a collection of random thoughts. My fiancee and I just bought a house, so there are some pictures of that. I put it there as my new 20 percent project because it needs a bit of work.