Having been there at the time, IE on Mac was the best browser on that system at the time, by far. Netscape 4 looked like a bloated piece of crap that emulated random bits of Appearance Manager, crashed constantly, and had a nasty tendency of not yielding the event loop, which effectively locked the system. IE, by contrast, was fast, stable, used Appearance Manager, looked native and matched the Macs coming out at the time, and had better privacy controls, and other stuff that I don't even remember. Getting IE on our Macs was a big deal when I was in school, and it was pretty much the first thing I downloaded on a new Mac--the second being Outlook Express.

Now, by the time OS X rolled around, IE was aging very quickly, and by the time Safari 1.0 finally came out, anyone who cared about that sort of thing had jumped to Camino. But that was long after the initial IE port, and I don't think you can possibly say that IE 5 on Mac was crap from the antitrust effort.

Not to mention that Netscape 4 never really implemented CSS. There was a CSS-to-JSS (JavaScript Style Sheets) translation level that almost worked most of the time, but it couldn't manage markup that resulted in a deeply-nested native object hierarchy (something that was altogether too easy to do in straightforward HTML). Nor did DIV or IFRAME properly translate to LAYER and ILAYER. Element addressing in NS was pretty much strictly hierarchical; one needed to include a tree search for NS to get something similar to getElementByXXX(). (And I had to support that horrid thing until 2005.)

I can also confirm this. I had one of the first iMacs and I remember Netscape crashing constantly and being way slower than IE (Hell, I think the first time I was really surprised by a browser's speed was when I installed IE on a mac).

Netscape 7 (IIRC) seemed a little better than IE, but it came too late and my machine could barely run it, so I just kept using Internet Explorer.

I think Tantek Celik might disagree with you about IE 5 on the Mac. I seem to remember it had the most advanced CSS support available at the time.

I concur with the responses to my post. NS4 was horrible. Mac IE5 was really nice.

My point was Microsoft advanced and got out in front and won and discouraged the browser market and many web developers. Web applications started to compromise on features.

MS always has/had really great engineers. MSDN is great too.

But we should thank Mozilla developers for overcoming the discouragement and freeing us from that stagnation.

The MS IE team should thank Mozilla and the Chrome team also.