I remember using IE when they started bundling it with Windows and it was a FAR better experience with instant loading instead of waiting Netscape to load. Everyone likes to blame the bundling of IE as causing Netscape to fail, but in reality, the initial versions of IE just worked better. Netscape's engineers knew this, and probably realized they had to rewrite to compete with the speed of IE.
Interestingly enough, these days hardly anyone I know uses IE or Safari even though both are bundled with their respective operating systems. Most of these folks install Chrome because they are familiar with it and it doesn't impose any significant performance penalty.
Ideally, Netscape should have been optimizing their browser for speed all along. But since they were the only kid on the block for so long, they became numb to how slow things had gotten. It took IE coming in with a much better experience to shake them into action. Unfortunately, by then it was too late for Netscape as a business to recover.
In oldschool firefox, maybe in navigator too, pre-loading was implemented as a tray icon. The tray icon would load at startup, and could be used to launch the browser. It still felt overly heavy.
Sure. You make a great point. A mere four and half years after the article was written... ta da, Firefox! Straight outta nowhere, refuting the article's core point. One day they chuck out their dirty old codebase, then just four and half years later out pops their shining new browser. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Spolsky!
The rewrite wasn't Firefox. The rewrite was Netscape 6. Firefox was streamlined version of Netscape 6 which hit 1.0 four years after Netscape 7. So from Netscape 4.0 to Firefox 1.0 was 7 years.
I think Joel's argument was that continual refactoring and improvement could have allowed one to evolve into the other in a much shorter time.
And I think that's a dubious proposition, because the advantage Firefox had over both Netscape and IE was simplicity and speed. Can you name a single software product that gets faster, smaller, and simpler over time? I can't think of any; in general, software seems to accrete features, and if it manages to lose them, it usually grows new features in their place. Netscape was replaced by IE, which was replaced by Firefox, which was replaced by Chrome, which is getting replaced by native mobile widgets. In each case, they needed to build off something that started off at an earlier point in their evolutionary line, throwing away all features that had been developed as the software met actual users. Mosaic begat Netscape, then Microsoft started back with the Mosaic code by licensing Spyglass, then Firefox went back to the rewritten Netscape 6 code, then KHTML begat Safari begat Chrome.
It became that way because developers were able to run laps round Microsoft (who clung to an old, bad codebase).
And because it was a redesign not just a rewrite, and the redesign redefined what browsers did.
Firefox, as we use it today is a rewrite of that rewrite, with god forbid far less features than the original!
I wonder, with a little more money behind Netscape, and without anti-competitive MS browser bundling, would Joel's piece look so correct in hindsight?