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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

Doing the rewrite definitely tanked the company. That's a fairly low bar that "not doing a rewrite" has to get over to be a better option.

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Microsoft giving away IE for free probably had more to do with Netacape's downfall than the rewrite alone.

Being unable to respond won't have helped.

How many people actually paid for the Netscape browser in the first place? Was selling the browser ever a viable business model?

Netscape could have developed different ways of getting money, like ads on the start page or default search engine. But such schemes could only have worked if they had retained a large market share, which they jeopardized with the rewrite.

I was always a little irritated to see a boxed copy of Netscape in stores, but it did solve the 'how do I get my initial web browser?' problem for people who had no idea what "FTP" is. So I'd say that for the majority of people (the 90% who were not tech people), they bought it once. Once they got later in the adoption cycle that would have dropped off, and the moment IE shipped that would immediately trend to zero.

Netscape was free because Mosaic was free, and Mosaic was free because of the National Science Foundation. (As for getting your initial browser, IIRC you could send away for copy of Mosaic on 2 floppies for the cost of shipping and media, but that could take weeks)

I think ISP's probably did more for distributing browsers at the time.

The Netscape business model was largely about selling their FastTrack Sever (for "eCommerce") and per-seat browser licensing to for-profits.

They had a reputation for giving away betas and pre-release copies on their FTP servers.

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