« It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time »

With the benefit of twenty years of hindsight, I think the programmers who performed the rewrite in question did a better job than the original Netscape implementation.

Come to think of it, I'm typing this message on the direct descendent of that rewrite, while the competitor to whom they gave « a gift of two or three years » has been forced to abandon their codebase in favour of a third-party one.