No, the DOM put into IE was legitimately better than that in the old NN. MS won that war because their browser was BETTER, period.
They then sat on their laurels and the rest of the world passed them by, so now they're still trying to play catchup.
But at the time? No, anyone who had any experience in the DOM of IE vs NN would hands down push IE. It was just better in every way.
Where did I mention Netscape? I didn't.
IE5 is from 1999, IE6 from 2001, and they were undoubtedly better than Navigator; but the first 0.x releases of Mozilla with the new Gecko engine are from late 2000/early 2001, and were better than IE (although the suite was slow and bloated). Firefox was branched out in 2002 and took off very quickly because it was a great engine without the bloat of full Mozilla. That's why people pushed it (or rather Phoenix) right off the bat.
If you were pushing IE6 over Mozilla or Firefox in 2001/2002, you weren't paying attention. Navigator all but died in 1999.
When developers were pushing IE was when it was IE vs NN.
"Microsoft has lost over 300 million browser users in 2016, mostly to Chrome, tracking site shows"
No, I didn't forget. But you forgot to say that MS did all that with draft specifications or even no spec at all (XMLHttpRequest), just to beat everyone to market, then refused to correct their implementation once the standard was revised and agreed by others. And they sprinkled ActiveX on top, for good measure.
> developers (and their managers) lapped it up
Disagree. Developers were the ones that pushed Mozilla and then Firefox (and then Chrome) as soon as they could.
> Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat
Microsoft did the right thing for their own bank account: they smashed the competition with bundling then left IE to flounder, even obliterating their dedicated team, because they had reached their objective, which was to dominate the web so that they could sell what they really cared about: ActiveX and other Windows-only technologies.
> the problem is that everyone likes the boss.
No, the problem is that people are lazy. IE won with OEM bundling on Windows. Chrome is winning with OEM bundling on Android. As long as the default is good enough, people won't switch, especially 15 years ago when downloads took a degree of effort (waiting several minutes, restarting after failure etc etc) and now on mobile where it is awkward and/or completely forbidden to switch browser. This is basically what the article says as well: they couldn't push a browser, they had to push an OS with a browser bundled. If people don't switch, developers can't build for alternative browsers, because their managers won't allow the additional time and effort.