Hacker News Reader

This is a wonderful summary. The only thing I would add is that the fumbled rewrite was, IIRC, Netscape’s reaction to the rise of MS. So I would argue that IE really did kill off Netscape.

Also misses the Linux and Mac history - KHTML/Konquerer and WebKit/Safari, which of course was the basis for Chrome. Google didn’t need to start from scratch.

View on HN

I know there's more history to webkit, but that didn't really seem relevant to the rise and decline of IE... I glossed over it for the sake of brevity. (And yes I know, I still failed to keep it brief, despite that).

As for the decision to do a rewrite - sure Microsoft put pressure on Netscape, and that did influence their decision, and sure Microsoft might have killed off Netscape anyway - but the rewrite still was Netscape's own decision, and it was also Netscape who failed to pull it off successfully.

Of course. I thought your summary was awesome - brought back a lot of memories - and was just trying to add colour.

I do remember reading Mozillazine to keep up to date with the rewrite… and at some point, it was a year at least, I just gave up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com