Navigator was free at first; Netscape's idea was that the money was in the web server. Free (that is, initially price-matched) MSIE just made changing strategy different when the server thing fell flat. Netscape going all in on JSSS (with a half-assed CSS translation module) didn't help at all, nor did strict hierarchical access paths (no "all" collection object, which also affected how the CSS-that-was-really-JSSS worked)... and missing the idea of background requests (XMLHttpRequest) sealed the deal.