The article somewhat misrepresents Netscape's attempted rewrite. I was at Netscape at the time, although I never worked on the rewrite. >The solution Netscape

The article somewhat misrepresents Netscape's attempted rewrite. I was at Netscape at the time, although I never worked on the rewrite. >The solution Netscape found was to rewrite the whole browser from scratch, in order to create a new code base that would be easier to evolve. It is true that the Navigator codebase was hard to work in, but the rewrite had another big motivation: it was in Java. One of Netscape's strengths was that Navigator was cross-platform: Win32, Win16, MacOS, and various Unices. The problem was that it was getting hard to find anybody to work on anything but Win32--in particular, MacOS was perceived as a dying platform, and developers were fleeing. So the idea was that Javagator would let us move forward with just a few specialists on each of the minor platforms. (Of course, looking back, expecting reasonable performance out of Java that decade may have been pretty stupid. There was a project underway called Electrical Fire, which I think became, or fed into, Sun's first JIT; but we probably shouldn't have assumed it would succeed.) >In the case of Netscape versus Microsoft, Netscape gave up all the development advantage they had. This is just flat-out wrong. For it to be true, Netscape would have had to have essentially everybody working on Javagator; we definitely didn't. I think it was something like 5-10 people at most.