In what world was Netscape a failure? Made some people an awful lot of money and then gave us Firefox... Pretty far from failure

Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc.

Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.