They did a Big Rewrite which was somewhat bogged down by feature creep.
They were rewriting not just a browser, but also an Outlook competitor and a WYSIWYG webpage editor - and while doing that, they decided it would be cool to create a universal GUI runtime for all of them, powered by the browser engine itself!
In a way, it was an amazing effort (without which we wouldn't have Firefox and Thunderbird), but it was definitely more than most people expected of them.
They were rewriting not just a browser, but also an Outlook competitor and a WYSIWYG webpage editor - and while doing that, they decided it would be cool to create a universal GUI runtime for all of them, powered by the browser engine itself!
In a way, it was an amazing effort (without which we wouldn't have Firefox and Thunderbird), but it was definitely more than most people expected of them.