Comment by olavk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olavk | Hacker News Reader

Joel does not mention that Netscape code was so bad that it cost them serious credibility and customers. As a Netscape user back in the day, I did not care whether Netscape used unittests or duct tape, but I switched from Netscape to Internet Explorer because Netscape was so buggy it was painful.

Over a few years Netscape code became so unmaintainable they had to start from scratch, which cost them years. Joel wrote in another famous article that this was a major mistake. However, if the code is a giant "pragmatic" mess with no architecture and no unittests, it becomes extremely hard and dangerous to refactor.

IE also got a lot of mindshare among developers because it actually tried to implement some standards like CSS, which Netscape completely disregarded. Netscapes "pragmatic" alternative to CSS, <spacer>, <layer> and so on luckily died together with Netscape.

Many developers started making IE-only pages because it was almost impossible to get anything to work in Netscape 4. IE6 is pretty unpopular among developers today, but this is nothing compared to how the Netscape 4 generation was reviled back in the day by anyone having to develop for it.

> Remember, before you freak out, that Zawinski was at Netscape when they were changing the world. They thought that they only had a few months before someone else came along and ate their lunch

Also remember that they lost it all, and someone did eat their lunch. So maybe the their strategy should be reexamined?

The argument ingnores a fact that if netscape did not take off and be popular, microsoft might not ever consider buying spyglass browser and expanded it into IE (Eric Sink led the spyglass team, with his memoir http://www.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html) and waged browser war in late 90s.

What all software architects forget is, most of time, the piece of code that we wrote is to solve problems in life. Those problems have their life cycles; some are long, some are short. While we seems like to imagine the piece that we wrote will be a masterpiece as a Cathedral/Pyramid and last for 1000 years. Unfortunately that is not the case. Most of time, our programs are just solutions among solutions to a series of bootstrapping problems. So unless we have a lousy but popular solution to a problem, our potential competitors might just ignored a market and no progress happened for the field. And this is a lost to human progress.

It is the same as maintaining old buildings, if condition is right, you may just tear it down and rebuild what you deem is fit by today's standard. But don't forget the original building has served its purpose.

Edit:

I personally have affection for Netscape 1.0. I still remembered how people in my lab in Taipei ftped to netscape's download server and waited for the moment when they uploaded the tgz file and started to download it and installed it on Sun workstations. And by using it I felt making stuffs on internet is better than studying physics and the decision changed my life.

Obviously Netscape created a revolution. The "duct-tape" approach allowed them to iterate quickly and deliver Netscape 1.0 to the masses and change the world.

However, the rapid success of Netscape was very much due to that the basic architecture and protocols of the web was already designed by others. I give Netscape credit for the <img> tag, but apart from that, almost anything Netscape designed on their own were ill-conceived disasters from <font> and <frameset> to <layer> and JSSS.

So I think the correction to the duct-tape approach is that it works best if somebody else already designed the basic architecture, e.g. if you are copying an already established product. It does not seem to work very well if you have to design something original.

Jamie Zawinski explained that the most of the bad code was introduced by the people of Collabra, that was acquired by Netscape and ended up leading the new development efforts for version 4 of the browser. These people had no experience in writing multi-platform code, and added a lot of the bad features that we came to hate during the browser wars. And the email component he wrote was never really used.

You mention a few strategic mistakes that Netscape made. Those were poor decisions. Netscape certainly went downhill when it moved from the quick and lightweight Navigator to the slow, bloated, and buggy Communicator. Shying away from standards like CSS in favor of doing their own thing was a bad idea. However, don't forget that the early versions of Netscape, which is where jwz played a much larger role, were great.

The biggest reason (by far) that Netscape faded into obscurity, though, is that Microsoft bundled IE with Windows.

More importantly, these strategic decisions about the product were not made by guys like jwz. jwz is a hacker. Like many hackers, his opinion was often at odds with the strategies of the Business People in charge.

I don't think it's fair to use these strategic missteps to discredit jwz or Joel's point about the balance between purity and pragmatism in writing code.

Parent has the worst vote count/relevance score I've ever seen. JWZ didn't write Netscape 4.

Netscape had quality issues long before version 4. Navigator really felt like it never left beta. Version 4 was just the point where the accumulated technical debt had become so huge that it proved impossible to recover from - and at the same time IE matured as a credible alternative.

The <img> tag was a nice pragmatic solution, but from there it went quickly downhill. Already around version 2 Netscape was adding badly thought-out features like <font>, <frameset> etc. which have taken a decade to get rid off. Rendering bugs and inconsistencies were never fixed.

They could probably have recovered and consolidated by stepping back and focusing a bit more on quality and sound design for a while. But they didn't.

It seems every single project Netscape developed was either abandoned or turned out so buggy it was unusable. Clearly no single programmer can be blamed for that, and I believe Netscape had lots of brilliant developers on board. (And I don't doubt that JWZ was a brilliant programmer.) It must have been the overall "duct-tape" mentality that was to blame.

Some of the other replies blames various parties like Collabra, the "business people", strategic mistakes, Microsoft and so on. Sure Netscape made some strategic blunders, but it is still one of the few examples where genuinely bad code quality was a major reason for the downfall of a company. (Quark would be one of the few other - like Netscape they squandered a near-monopoly by releasing increasingly buggy software and pissing off their users).

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