There was no plan to rewrite the browser. It was to replace the rendering and layout engine with Gecko, and the chrome with XUL. Both of these were the foundati

There was no plan to rewrite the browser. It was to replace the rendering and layout engine with Gecko, and the chrome with XUL. Both of these were the foundation of Firefox, so wasn’t such a bad decision after all? Netscape 5 was post revenue decimation and was a bizarre organizational screwup between the Mozilla efforts and the existing rendering engine folks, where the existing engine folks thought they could salvage the renderer. They were not able to, and the gecko efforts were the only viable path forward. I’ve read Joel’s outsider view from Microsoft’s monopolist vantage and it doesn’t square with reality of what actually occurred. And his discussion of the situation sans the fact Netscape was in disarray after his employer destroyed our business illegally leaves a lot of crucial context out of the discussion. Fact is even in Mozilla and Netscape 6, and in both efforts for 5, most of the code carried over. The rewrite was primarily focused on integrating or improving the rendering engine (remember 5 was two competing camps trying to get to done first, some bizarre cargo cult management decision based of Microsoft culture). Ironically the historical truth is Joel’s advocated way of incrementalism was the side that actually lost and couldn’t deliver anything. The rewrite is what you use today in Firefox.