> What eludes me is what happened to all the previous code that Netscape
> released to the public.
It's still available. It probably doesn't compile anymore, but it's
still there.
> It's as if all the freelance programmers out
> there just deleted all that stuff and started over from scratch.
Most of the rewrite was generated inside Netscape itself. Gecko was
originally started by Netscape, and all work has stemmed from it.
> Reduced functionality was definitely not expected.
Oh, I don't know. Which is worse: having temporary reduced
functionality and getting a significantly better browser due to better
architecture, or having more functionality layered on a codebase largely
the same as the one written in 1994 that's brittle and likely breaks a
lot of existing functionality? Mozilla went for the former, as I would
hope most good software engineers would.
