this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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They became a poster child for why you should never “start over from scratch” even if your current codebase is awful. Because when you do that your competitors keep going, then they have years on your now stale product. Netscape lost all on their own…
Also: selling a browser? Man, the 90’s where wild.
That's rather simplifying history and not the main reason Netscape failed.
Netscape lost because Microsoft used it's dominant monopoly position to bundle Internet Explorer with windows. By 1999 the writing was already on the wall - IE had already overtaken Netscape market share and was growing rapidly.
The Mozilla project and code base change was a gamble to try and fix the problems. When Microsoft released IE6 2001 they didn't bother releasing another major version for 6 years as they were so dominant.
So while the code base change was arguably mishandled, at worst it accelerated the decline. Instead the whole story is a poster child for how monopoloes can be used to destroy competition. The anti trust actions in the US and EU came too late for Netscape.
Ironically Microsoft was the receiving end of the same treatment when Google started pushing Chrome via it's own monopoly in search. They made a better product than the incumbent but they pushed it hard via their website that everyone uses.
I was being a bit facetious, thanks for the corrections and insight. Cheers!