As someone who used Netscape, IE and Opera back then, Netscape was unfortunately very buggy (and not just in terms of stability). It's offline cache didn't always work (i..e you could resize the window, and it would re-download things instead of using the local cache, which was very painful on 28.8 dialup!) I remember being able to browse some sites very quickly while dialed up in IE, and then later offline be able to view them more leisurely all fine in offline mode. Netscape couldn't consistently do that.

IE 5, 5.5 and 6.0 (this last one at least initially, but clearly it stayed around too long without development) were noticeably faster and more user-friendly in my experience.

Then you weren't around in the IE5-6 era. It was definitely a better browser. But then they decided IE6 could never be improved and sat on it for years.

IE was positively fantastic at the time. So much more stable, light-weight, and sane than Netscape Navigator.