There are some really insidious errors in this comment. It's close enough to the truth that it runs the risk of being taken at face value, despite the errors.

There are some really insidious errors in this comment. It's close enough to the truth that it runs the risk of being taken at face value, despite the errors. > Microsoft licensed the source code to NCSA Mosaic Not quite. They used Spyglass Mosaic, which shared only the name. Spyglass Mosaic was a from-scratch implementation. https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html > What never seems to get mentioned in these threads about Chrome and Mozilla is that Google hired a couple of Mozilla Firefox developers to kickstart Chrome. Not quite. Early Firefox development resembled Linux: multiple industry actors collaborating on a single codebase—pretty unlike the way it works today, where a single (bumbling) corporation is almost totally responsible for marketing, product direction, and development. Google was one of the biggest contributors to Firefox development. The Firefox lead was a Google employee being paid to do just that. When Google decided to do Chrome, they pulled their engineers off Firefox, with parallels to what later happened with the WebKit -> Blink fork: an initial cooperative effort, followed by their chafing at the overheads of collaboration and the lack of total control, followed by breaking away to do their own thing. If there was any amount of poaching/brain drain that should be mentioned but no one really talks about, it's how many ex-Mozilla Corp folks left for Facebook and is partially responsible for the engineering culture there.