That new codebase was iterated on for five years before a viable browser was released, and two more before Firefox 1.0 appeared. The history of the WebKit code

That new codebase was iterated on for five years before a viable browser was released, and two more before Firefox 1.0 appeared. The history of the WebKit codebase stretches back as far as Gecko. The earliest KDE HTML work I can definitively establish is in 1997. We got Konquerer in 2000, but Safari didn't emerge until 2003. 5-7 years before something other than IE could again be competitive... Do you really think that disproves Joel's point? I think it may be quite the opposite...