Joe Hewitt is an American

software programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...

who is best known for his work on the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

web browser and related software development tools like Firebug and

DOM Inspector DOM Inspector (DOMi) is a web developer tool created by Joe Hewitt and was originally included in Mozilla Application Suite as well as versions of Mozilla Firefox prior to Firefox 3. It is now included in Firefox, and SeaMonkey. Its main purp ...

Education

His first project took place while still attending Hopatcong High School.

Career

Hewitt created the website Feff World with Douglas Palermo. From 2000 to 2003, he worked on UI programming at

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...

. Subsequently, he worked on AOL's Boxely UI project, which renders software such as AIM Triton and

AOL Explorer AOL Explorer, previously known as AOL Browser, was a graphical web browser developed by AOL. It was released in July 2005 as a free, standalone download, or as an optional software bundled while installing AOL Instant Messenger. AOL Explorer su ...

. In July 2007, Hewitt led the release of the iUI user interface library which greatly simplified

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

development for Apple's

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

. He has been working on

Parakey Parakey is a web-based computer user interface proposed by Firefox contributors Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Ross describes it as "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." The idea behind it is to make image, video, and writi ...

with Blake Ross. Parakey was acquired by

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

in July 2007. In August 2007, he wrote the iPhone-specific version of

. He was responsible for creating Facebook’s iPhone app, which as of 2009 was the most downloaded iPhone app of all time. In November 2009, Hewitt ceased development on the application, citing Apple policies. In January 2009, he released the open-source library for iPhone developers Three20. In 2011, Hewitt left

References

External links

*
Interview with Joe Hewitt
Living people 1978 births People from Hopatcong, New Jersey American computer programmers Engineers from New Jersey Facebook employees {{US-engineer-stub