I've mentioned this on HN already but despite the fact that I agree with Joel about many things, I really hate when people pull that article out of their hat li

I've mentioned this on HN already but despite the fact that I agree with Joel about many things, I really hate when people pull that article out of their hat like it is some sort of debate ender. Netscape was already fucked prior to starting the rewrite, mostly due to their ill-conceived forays into "groupware". If Navigator wasn't rewritten when it was the layout engine from the rewrite wouldn't have existed to power Firefox and Mozilla probably wouldn't exist as an entity right now. So in a very indirect way, the Netscape rewrite actually saved the Netscape browser lineage and probably helped the web from falling into a much longer mini-dark-ages than it did around the NS/IE 5-6 era. And there's not really any good evidence that it did the old "Netscape" any harm since it isn't like Navigator was ever a significant profit center anyway (I know they did charge for corporate usage of Navigator, but that was never going to be a sustainable business, so the rewrite had no impact on that).