> Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.

My feeling of IE3 to IE6 (at its release time) is that (anti-competitive strategies aside), many (most?) average consumers would very likely choose IE over Netscape if they gave both a bit of a test drive.

In 1996 (maybe 1997) I was 14/15 at the time and remember coming to the conclusion that IE3 ran much faster on Windows 95 compared to Netscape.

It being (anticompetitively) free helped, but on the 100Mhz Pentiums with 8MB of RAM in our computer lab, you’d be a masochist to choose Netscape over it for random web browsing.

IE4 was quite resource intensive, but because MS anticompetitively pre-loaded it on OS startup, it still started faster than Netscape.

IE6 I found pleasant to use and it wasn’t until Firefox came out with tabs (Opera had them earlier, but you would often encounter websites it wouldn’t render properly, probably due to IE targeted design), that IE lost its sheen for me.

Firefox was popular enough that developers started caring about standards compliant websites at which point IE started entering the “despised” category, but it may not have actually been displaced from its top spot were it not for Chrome.