No personal offense intended, but Netscape was crushed by its own technological problems and missing business model as much as anything else. By the time IE4 was out, it was unquestionably the better browser - the Communicator suite was buggy and bloated by comparison, and only fell further behind as Mozilla scrambled to rewrite the whole thing.
Certainly, bundling IE into the OS helped - not to mention Microsoft's classic EEE approach to web standards - but post-Netscape but pre-Chrome there was a time when people were happy to switch to Firefox from IE because Firefox was simply the superior browser.
Certainly, bundling IE into the OS helped - not to mention Microsoft's classic EEE approach to web standards - but post-Netscape but pre-Chrome there was a time when people were happy to switch to Firefox from IE because Firefox was simply the superior browser.