Firefox Girl — the story of Alexandra Ansgar
Photoshopped picture of the girl in a Firefox t-shirt I added to one of my postings got a warm welcome (not as warm as Ubuntu Girl, mind you!), so I decided to hit on an idea and seek for more information. What’s her name, where is she from, and — before anything else — what on Earth does she have to do with the Firefox browser.
Alexandra Ansgar, the Firefox Girl
Here’s what I found so far – photo leaked for the first time at some Portuguese blog, and after that, it was posted at several tech blogs all around the world (below you can see my translation of its Portuguese description). It looks like the fake information about “Scandinavian top model Alexandra Ansgar” wasn’t published by original author of the faked photo, but much later, in a story produced by people of Gadgetizer.
I can write a text that probably would be a summary of 5000 words of the advantages in moving for Firefox and about all disadvantages and terrible dangers behind MS Internet Explorer… But the following image will be much more successful, I guess.
After that, Museum of Hoaxes posted a more detailed story about Firefox girl, and there I found that blonde girl is also known as Emy18; I also got a link to some crappy site filled full with softporn pictures. Unfortunately, due the lack of her true name, and no white t-shirt photos, this particular site wasn’t much useful for the Firefox Girl investigation. Finally, thanks to folks posting random things on some adult forum I got to know that pretty much all what I needed to do was performing a search for “Francesca Lee”.
The Firefox Girl, before the Photoshop makeover
Her name is Francesca Lee, she is based on the south coast of the United Kingdom and has been modeling for about 1,5 year. She started modeling for a friend who was an amateur photographer; she really enjoyed it and things went from there.
Two finest pictures of Francesca Lee are added to this post. If you are looking for more, go straight to her official portfolio. It’s not safe for browsing at work, so you better make sure that your boss is far away from your desk when you’re browsing this stuff ;)
Update #1: First of all, thanks for the GREAT feedback you have been sending in by emails, and comments added to this post. Special thanks to DailyTech readers who refer to my writings every once in a while, always when some Firefox news with a Firefox Girl thumbnail reaches the DailyTech frontpage. That’s really kind of you, thank you.
Update #2: I made a promise to share more pictures; here are the links — click here to see some samples of photos taken during the Firefox white t-shirt session; snapshots of 14 other sessions are also available (obviously both of these are NSFW; nothing hard though, the girl just shows some skin here and there). In contrast to other stuff on the official website, these are all available for free.
Update #3: Alrighty then. After almost two years after publishing this blog post, I finally got some feedback from Francesca. Not from Francesca, from Emy. I mean, from Haley. Well, okay — just see for yourself!
Im not Francesca Lee. For a start she doesn’t have my face shape or the scar above my right eye that I got on my friends parents coffee table when I was a kid.
My name is Haley Emy Bickers. I grew up in UK. Moved to LA at 15. Now live in Ontario. Emy was my grandmothers name and is my middle name.
I used to sing and the firefox picture was created along with other mock ups to take to sponsorship meetings. I posted them on a blog page i had at the time and someone took them from there and spread the firefox rumour.
Here’s some of the mock ups:
And this is what I looked like at 15:
This is me with my parents Brenda and Tony.
And this is me now:
