4 ms·
It was a bad rule back then, it is even worse now and it didn't even stand the test of time at Fog Creek (or Glitch, looks like they have renamed themselves), w
by sgift 7y ago
It was a bad rule back then, it is even worse now and it didn't even stand the test of time at Fog Creek (or Glitch, looks like they have renamed themselves), where they had to do it for FogBugz to finally leave Wasabi behind. I could go on about how Firefox ended up very well and not as the complete disaster that Joel predicted back then, but that's besides the point here, namely: There can be good reasons to rewrite something and "hey, we do not find remotely enough people to work on the current code base" is pretty far up on that list.
- scarface74 7y agoSo you don’t consider it a “complete disaster” that Netscape went from 80% marketshare to almost nothing overnight? Not to mention that currently their existence is almost entirely dependent on their competitor - Google.
- Avamander 7y agoDo elaborate how its even remotely Rust's fault that FF has lost its marketshare.
- scarface74 7y agoWhat does Rust have to do with anything? Joel’s article I referenced was about Netscape rewriting their browser during the browser wars over a decade ago instead of improving their existing browser to compete with IE.
- Avamander 7y ago> Not to mention that currently their existence is almost entirely dependent on their competitor - Google. You wrote this sentence, it talks about Firefox and implies something went wrong there?
- scarface74 7y agoJoel’s article was about Netscape. Firefox was the ultimate result of Netscape trying to rewrite Netscape Navigator.
- goto11 7y agoThe article is about the disastrous complete rewrite of the Netscape browser. More recently Mozilla have rewritten some parts of their browser in Rust, but this time they are doing it incrementally.
- goto11 7y agoNetscape went from the dominant browser to a negligible browser share. They basically handed the browser market to IE on a platter. They only rebounded somewhat because MS abandoned IE development altogether. And the result of the rewrite was not even that good, which can be seen from everybody else building on webkit rather than Mozilla.
- JoshuaDavid 7y agoI think the unspoken and (imo) wrong assumption here is that if you have a codebase which nobody understands, and the success of your organization relies on iterating rapidly and correctly on that codebase for its continued survival, there is anything you can do that has a high probability of success. If you are in that situation, and you do not do a rewrite, you are likely to fail. If you are in that situation, and you do a rewrite, you are likely to fail. Sometimes there is no winning move.
- goto11 7y agoI don't doubt the existing code was a mess, but I'm pretty sure their time would have been better spent refactoring it into a more modular structure. For example, what actually made people switch to Firefox eventually was tabs and a popup-blocker. There was no need to rewrite the entire network stack from scratch to support this.