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And yet Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape. Who would have thought Mozilla would become relevant again five years after Netscape died? I'm starting to thin

And yet Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape. Who would have thought Mozilla would become relevant again five years after Netscape died? I'm starting to think open source projects are a lot more hardy than startups because they can't run out of money.

wmf 14y ago
It's possible that Firefox would be more mature or popular than it already is if they never did the rewrite.
- whyenot 14y ago
  Firefox would not exist without the rewrite. We'd still be stuck using Mozilla.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  Doubtful. The old rendering engine was a dead end and everyone knew it. Netscape 5 still would have been miles behind IE 6, and it would have taken substantial engineering effort to get it there. Instead, they focused on Gecko and Mozilla.
- akkartik 14y ago
  1. There's no way to confirm or falsify that counterfactual. 2. Even if we stipulate that Firefox would be more mature/popular without the rewrite, I think there are many decisions that might have had an equal or larger impact. For example, the design choices they made for their plugin architecture made it harder to compete when Chrome came along, and have had deep influence on their ability to do frequent unobtrusive releases. If you admit one counterfactual you must admit them all. Was the rewrite really the biggest turning point in their trajectory? 3. If you'd offered the firefox creators the level of success it has today, they would take it in a heartbeat. Quibbling about levels of success is a luxury you can only afford after you have managed to not die. (http://paulgraham.com/die.html http://paulgraham.com/die.html) That was what my comment was concerned with. Conventional wisdom (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) makes the far stronger claim that rewrites kill; if we retreat to arguing levels of success I will happily declare victory and go home :)

wmf 14y ago

It's possible that Firefox would be more mature or popular than it already is if they never did the rewrite.

whyenot 14y ago
Firefox would not exist without the rewrite. We'd still be stuck using Mozilla.
streptomycin 14y ago
Doubtful. The old rendering engine was a dead end and everyone knew it. Netscape 5 still would have been miles behind IE 6, and it would have taken substantial engineering effort to get it there. Instead, they focused on Gecko and Mozilla.
akkartik 14y ago
1. There's no way to confirm or falsify that counterfactual. 2. Even if we stipulate that Firefox would be more mature/popular without the rewrite, I think there are many decisions that might have had an equal or larger impact. For example, the design choices they made for their plugin architecture made it harder to compete when Chrome came along, and have had deep influence on their ability to do frequent unobtrusive releases. If you admit one counterfactual you must admit them all. Was the rewrite really the biggest turning point in their trajectory? 3. If you'd offered the firefox creators the level of success it has today, they would take it in a heartbeat. Quibbling about levels of success is a luxury you can only afford after you have managed to not die. (http://paulgraham.com/die.html http://paulgraham.com/die.html) That was what my comment was concerned with. Conventional wisdom (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) makes the far stronger claim that rewrites kill; if we retreat to arguing levels of success I will happily declare victory and go home :)