[olavk]

Yeah but Microsoft let IE stagnate for half a decade after it had achieved dominance. There were 5 years between IE 6 and IE 7. If MS hadn't disbanded the IE team but had kept up the pace of incremental development, I very much doubt Mozilla would have ever been able to catch up again.

I would say Joels point still holds in the general case where you you can't count on competitors to just stop developing their product until you have achieved parity again.

[mjw1007]

IE6 was released about the same time as Mozilla 0.9.3. I think Mozilla was already ahead in technical terms at that point.

Certainly it had better CSS support, and on my machine it crashed less.

The important difference was a matter of support for "official" standards against support for "best viewed in Internet Explorer" sites.