[meat-eater]

Code reuse cuts the development time and brings down the defect rate. So it should be a good thing. Quite the opposite approach taken by the Mozilla guys. Those guys alsmost built their own everything (rendering engine, foundation classes, etc). There are a lot of open source libs there also, but i guess google wanted to focus on the minimal UI design and the per process architecture.

[etal]

Also, consider when the original codebases were written. There was nothing to borrow when Netscape/Mozilla first took a crack at it, in many of these cases.

[gaius]

There was a reason for that (clue: how many platforms does Mozilla support? How many does Chrome).

[wheels]

The hard parts of writing a web browser are the rendering engine, the javascript engine, the transport layer and security code. The rest, comparatively, is trivial and there are cross-platform OSS libs for all of those.

etal got it right though -- Mozilla began as an OSS project in 1998, long before many of those libs were available.

[stcredzero]

Hmmm, so Mozilla is taking the Java Swing/Squeak Smalltalk strategy of ensuring cross-platform compatibility by doing everything yourself?