Am I wrong in understanding that this rewrite is what produced Gecko, which is still one of the top browser engines a quarter of a century later? I really think Joel called this one wrong.
Netscape could have been as big as Google. Instead, Microsoft ate their lunch. Now, even Firefox too has become niche.
Off-topic: anyone else remember the Mozilla browser before Firefox? Remember XUL? That was with KDE and Gnome 1.x, when the Linux desktop was just round the corner. Who needs Word when you could use StarOffice....
Netscape Navigator used to be a commercial product that people paid for. Firefox is now free and is used by so few people (me included) that a growing number of sites see no economic value in supporting it.
He makes an exception for open source projects. But a from scratch rewrite is one factor that killed Netscape. Wonder how many thousands of hours were burned on xul at a critical moment.
