> IE only stagnated because they kind of wipedout the competition

Yeah, people forget that IE was a great browser. It was easily the most performant, I think driven by the Outlook web (I believe the first web app to make use of XMLHttpRequest) team demanding IE team make it so. The issue, like you said, is they won and then stopped updating.

It was sad to me watching that battle unfold. Maybe i was ignorant (and maybe i still am), but I learned most of what i know about web dev on Netscape sitting in a mac lab at university viewing source code. I HATED when IE started to takeover and eventually won that first battle. I miss Netscape :-(