PALO ALTO, Calif. - Facebook Inc., the owner of the Internet's second most popular social networking site, said Thursday that it bought Parakey, a startup run by two of the engineers that helped build Firefox's popular Web browser.

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Facebook, the Internet's leading social utility, today announced that it has acquired Parakey, a startup run by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox, an open-source and non-profit web browser.

By Ian Watson, The Business, London Dec. 23--Blake Ross is another of those American hi-tech prodigies. You know the type. At 14 he's writing software from home for Netscape and by 15 he's quit school and moved from Florida to California to join Netscape as a hotshot intern.

By Bridget Carey, The Miami Herald Nov. 7--How do you get people to want your product when they don't understand what it is? Firefox Web browser co-creator Blake Ross said terminology is just one of the challenges for the future success of the free, open-sourced software.

It was the summer of 2004, and a group of 10 techies huddled together in an office in Mountain View, Calif., facing a daunting task. They had embarked on an ambitious effort to create a Web browser that could go mano-a-mano with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.