Trick is that it was not a war on browsers, it was a war on servers. In particular, intraservers.

Netscape, as best i can tell, pretty much seeded the idea of using web tech on the office network.

And this was a direct threat to the market share of MS on that network.

Thus MS rolled out IIS and IE, with the latter working closely with the former (as was the case between Netscape Navigator and Enterprise server).

So in the end the "browser war" was a proxy war for the office network.