An unexpected full circle moment

Wrexham. Firefox. Nex.

For most people, it’s two logos on a jersey.

For the cofounders of Nex, it was a full circle moment.

Back in 2003…

We wrote our first commercial software in the summer of 2003. It was a web-based calendar application for our alma mater, the University of Hong Kong.

We watched a downloaded video of Steve Jobs introducing iCal (YouTube wouldn’t launch until 2005), and wondered if we could create a similar experience in a browser. The result looked remarkably similar to Google Calendar, which launched three years later.

At the time, IE6 dominated the web with around 90% market share and was considered the most modern browser.

That same year, the Mozilla Foundation was established to continue the Mozilla project, which began after Netscape open-sourced its browser. The browser was called Firebird at the time before being renamed Firefox in 2004.

We tested our applications on both IE and Firebird, which later became Firefox, my primary browser for years.

We kept building web applications. In 2005, we even asked everyone at the Hong Kong Arts Festival to install Firefox because we built one of their internal applications using XUL, a Firefox-only UI technology. We drank the XML, XSLT, and XUL Kool-Aid early, before AJAX became mainstream and long before HTML5 absorbed many of those ideas.

That experience fundamentally changed how we thought about web applications. It directly inspired us to create EditGrid in 2006, one of the world’s earliest online spreadsheets. At the height of the Web 2.0 era, EditGrid was acquired by Apple in 2008.

Fast forward to 2026…

I was incredibly excited when Nex had the opportunity to partner with Wrexham.

Two underdogs.

Two different journeys.

Determined to earn a place on the biggest stages.

We announced our partnership with Wrexham at the end of June.

Then, just days later, Firefox also became a Wrexham partner.

Imagine my surprise.

Firefox remains one of only three independently developed browser platforms. Its Gecko engine, alongside Apple’s WebKit and Google’s Blink, helps keep the web open through independent implementations of web standards.

Now, three underdogs.

Three very different journeys.

One jersey.

Sometimes life has a funny way of coming full circle.

Thank you, Wrexham.

And thank you, Firefox.