[d2]

Netscape 6 is (or was) the oft quoted example of why not to do this. All that old code may seem old and boring, but it has a huge amount of knowledge, wisdoms, learnings, fixed mistakes, performance improvements, great ideas, deleted bad ideas and security fixes built into it.

When you throw out your code you're throwing out all that knowledge on the assumption that you can build it all back with improvements.

Evolving an application from a known good state to a known better state is usually the best approach unless your codebase is small or your app has no traction.

Rewriting your app from the ground up is like getting divorced and dating a new girlfriend. The first few months are a lot of fun until you figure out how much you lost.

[quink]

Without Netscape 6, we wouldn't have had Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, and probably wouldn't have IE7, IE8, IE9 and KHTML/Webkit would have come about very differently and all these would have had much less competition.

Netscape 6, or at least the mere fact that it existed and worked well enough and the fact that it was the first browser ever that did standards well and focused on not much else other than standards, made it the most important browser ever created.

Netscape 6 was the most revolutionary browser project ever created and had the development effort behind Netscape 6 not been done, we would possibly have had a much worse very IE-only web today.

Never mind that beyond all that, Netscape 4 was terrible and deserved to be thrown out.

[shadowfox]

> Netscape 6 was the most revolutionary browser project ever created

I dont disagree with the general sentiment of your comment. But as someone who attempted to use Netscape 6 at various stages of its development, I fear that statement might be stretching facts a little bit.