The Mozilla project leaders had designed a system they hoped would turn their software into components they could snap together like LEGOs. However, this scheme required reams of extra boilerplate code—programmers had to do something like filling out a pile of forms to register new code with this reuse system—and this buried their browser in red tape. Now that we saw the implications of this engineering decision and the resulting 10:1 ratio of Mozilla code to Konqueror code, it seemed obvious that their component notion had gotten wildly out of hand. Mozilla was bloated, unwieldy, and
...more
