I just had one of those times when I thought I totally lost the ability to do simple logic. Take a look at this screenshot:

I'll break it down: req.readyState = 4, and batch.async = false.

Last time I checked 4 = 4. So blatantly (4 != 4) is false. And false && false is blatantly uber false, as true as Alice Cooper covering Barbie Girl.

So seeing firebug step through if (false) and onto the return statement made about as much sense as trying to raise Schrodinger's cat in a séance.

I think it's another quirk in Firebug. This time it's simply something funky going on with "step over".

The moral is: Firebug sometimes lies to you about where the current line is.

This is all part of me adapting DWR so that it can be used as a connector between Jaxer and some Java server. More on that in a bit.

It was about 5 years between Netscape 4 and Mozilla 1.0. In that time, they lost about 80% market share.

It was about 5 years between IE6 and IE7. In that time, they lost about 10% market share.

Just in case there was any doubt about the argument that Netscape killed themselves, clearly there were other forces at work. It wasn't just down to a much criticized rewrite decision. Perhaps a better remedy than trying to get Microsoft broken up, would have been to insist on the default installation of an alternate browser.