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Netscape 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
by goto11 7y ago
Netscape 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.