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Discussion on: 20 Fantastically Bad Predictions Made About Computing and Technology

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

Rewriting Netscape from scratch will work out really well!

It's called Firefox.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Nope.

The rewrite of Netscape was called Mozilla and was a disaster as explained in this classical article

Things You Should Never Do : rewrite your software from scratch (Joel on Software)

Firefox came later and was the simplification of Mozilla.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

So Firefox was the rewrite of Mozilla, the rewrite of Netscape. Meaning, by a separation of one iteration, Firefox is a rewrite-from-scratch of Netscape. And it turned out well. ;)

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Thorsten Hirsch

Jean-Michel is right - it was a disaster for Netscape. It was the cause for the company's bankruptcy (that's what their ex-employees say themselves!). Mozilla/Firefox source code was given away for free when the company was practically gone. And the software was way behind Internet Explorer in those days.

It took developers 2 or 3 years to make Mozilla/Firefox a decent product and it took several more years until one could say that it was a success. Netscape was long gone by then.