someone may want to read a coherent response to the suck piece on mozilla. it’s written by one of the netscape managers who was instrumental in opening the code:
“Pronouncing Mozilla dead has been a favored spectator sport since Jamie Zawinski first took a cut at it in March 1999. This is another in a long line of such articles, not the first, not the last, and those
participating in the project are for the most part used to this. Criticism won’t slack off until the project ships a 1.0 release (which IMO is at least 6 months off)”“The one major “hindsight” decision that could be seriously questioned is the decision in fall 1999 to do a rewrite prior to Mozilla 1.0 as opposed to releasing a 1.0 based on the original code. But then again
the conventional wisdom (put forth by the Web Standards Project and pretty much every other “outside observer”) at the time was that the old code base was unsalvageable, and that the cause of standards compliance demanded a rewrite.”
here’s another response from a developer’s perspective.