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The new historical perspective on this is very interesting. The code rewrite killed the company, but it gave birth to mozilla, which came back to topple IE from

by etler 13y ago

The new historical perspective on this is very interesting. The code rewrite killed the company, but it gave birth to mozilla, which came back to topple IE from its throne and help bring through a new renaissance of browser development. If they hadn't rewritten their code how would have history changed? Would we be where we are today? How many years behind would that setback have put us? The release of Firefox was instrumental at disrupting and evolving the web. With a poor code base could they have done that as effectively as they did? A company may be transient, and killed by choices that hurt them in the short run, but will support them in the long run. But good open source code is eternal. The quality speaks for itself. Their decision may have killed their company but it was astronomical for the web. From a higher level perspective, they did the right thing, and it shows that good code is so powerful, it can even outlive the company that made it.

masswerk 13y ago
On the other hand it was particularly for this stand-still of NS, why IE was on the throne. And this made HTML/JS effectively a proprietary standard, which brought web development eventually to a stand-still also. When open standards enforcing browsers finally became available (and – saying this as a once ardent NS-follower* – what a buggy mess NS 6.0 was in the beginning!), it was essentially a political question, whether they would succeed or not (as they were incompatible to most of the existing web code base). *) I used to code NS4.x-compatibility and open standards calls then, even, if I wasn't able to bill for these as clients were only interested in "does it work on IE, so it's fine".