From scratch? Like, rewrite all your libraries and nifty little UI tricks? Of course not.

But sometimes ripping out the plumbing and throwing the bigger pieces back together works wonderfully.

I guess that's called refactoring, though. :)

The point I'm getting at is, who does The Big Rewrite? I can't ever see myself wanting to rewrite sections of code that are working perfectly fine Just Because.

How much of The Big Rewrite was Mozilla? Did they literally rewrite everything? I can't imagine so. I bet they kept a LOT of code. It was probably more along the lines of a rather daunting refactor.

I'm just wondering what "starting fresh" means. For me, it normally means fixing architectural decisions that have become a huge pain in the but I'm keeping a LOT of the code base.