[monksy]

In context that's a pretty funny article to see how it didn't survive.

Netscape pre 5 or 6 was a mess. It was a downloadable desktop application that kept getting pushed to deliver new features with a struggling UI framework. Additionally, I would imagine that the group delivering this was rather small in respect to the size of the task. They didn't have CI/CD, git, etc to give feedback. This reeks of an overmainaged project that was intentionally underfunded.

Ultimately.. it was an unmaintable mess that required a rewrite to even continue. To me it sounds like it was tech debt piled deeper and higher.

What came of this? Complete browser rebuilds (mozilla mosaic, chrome, etc), and finally this caught fire through the Chrome project and Javascript acceleration at google.

[arnorhs]

To me this article is super valid for most software projects.

As for the Netscape anecdote, I wouldn't put too much weight on that part.

We do not know the extent of it, we do not know if it achieved its goals, and we absolutely can not say whether or not the alleged rewrite contributed to or affected the evolution of the product into firefox and eventually chrome etc

[monksy]

I would go as far as to say the rewrite and aggressive reconcepting of Netscape spurred the growth of newer browsers. NS 6 added too much that people didn't want or didn't want in that context.

My comment above was trying to point out: NS6 rewrite wasn't the only browser to start back from scratch at that time.

What I think Spolksy was advocating for: Don't try to completely rewrite things for fun, there are a lot of dark corners there.