Huh? I think you're off by a decade. Microsoft burned a lot of reputation by letting IE stagnate between 2001 (IE6) and 2011 (IE9), but at the time IE5 and IE6 shipped, they were legitimately faster, more compliant, and all-around better browsers than the Netscape versions of the time. I don't remember IE4 to comment on that, but there was certainly a time where IE was the best browser, both to users and developers. They simply failed to keep innovating on it.

> They simply failed to keep innovating on it.

This was not a failure. Web browsers are a direct threat to the Windows platform and Microsoft consciously chose to drop out of the browser wars.

When IE4 came out there was no comparison. Netscape Communicator was already a bloated, unstable mess. IE4 was a giant leap forward at the time with a cohesive DOM.

And IE 5 brought xmlhttprequest, which became kinda popular.

I wouldn't go as far back as 1995. I remember using Netscape those days and IE was considered the "hip & modern browser" just like we do now for Chrome. It was the best viewed in IE days and since there were no real standards or committee back then, everyone wrote their own feature set including MS. It did sure give us the annoying <blink> and <marquee> tags but remember it also gave us Ajax. The shit only really blew when Firefox came into scene with a faster, secure and more progressive browser than IE.

Although, I personally feel if firefox doesn't catchup with the webkit browsers, we will soon be taking a full circle.

Yeah, MSIE was the best browser through version 4. The real reason Netscape lost the browser wars was that it became a huge bloated mess. Now it probably couldn't have beat IE regardless of how good it was because of Microsoft's monopolistic practices, but IE was the best browser for a few years in the mid-90s.

Of course, they then proceeded to let it stagnate for the better part of a decade...

>they then proceeded to let it stagnate for the better part of a decade...

That is one of the side effects of being on top without the worry of competition AKA being a monopoly. Despite Chrome being my favorite browser, this is one the things that worries me the most when everyone yells "Port all browsers to Webkit!!!", we will inadvertently repeat history.

Southpark best visually described it in one of their episodes [1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Wall-Mart_This_Way_Co...

+1. I try to figure out where the "Port all browsers to WebKit!" crowd is coming from, but the only reasonable speculative theory that I can think of is that they weren't there for the first go-round.

> <blink>

<BLINK> was from Netscape. http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

In related amusements: https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E+tag

Oh, but let's not forget page transition animations introduced by IE. Thank God those died a rapid death.

The other thing that killed NetScape Communicator is that it had been costing $70 per copy. Remember... people used to pay for browsers.

> that killed NetScape Communicator is that it had been costing $70 per copy.

It didn't kill Netscape to charge per copy, that's how software works. People need to earn money for their work creating software.

What killed Netscape was Microsoft taking advantage of its monopoly by pushing itself into a new market with free software. Microsoft didn't need to earn money directly from the browser, so they could afford to give it away for free and take a loss.

While the monopoly control provided a simplified avenue for distribution the free price tag alone cannot be held to blame. By that analogy any free, open source product can push its way into a new market and kill the paid for competition which is clearly not the case.

I was jesting. ;) I happily bought several copies back then, which was a lot on an allowance for mowing grass, but FREE was very hard to beat. Of course there was a little Anti-Trust case that came out of those dealings.

>The other thing that killed NetScape Communicator is that it had been costing $70 per copy. Remember... people used to pay for browsers.

Yes but mine came free with the ISP's installation floppy diskettes, which was very cool of them. If I remember correctly, wasn't Opera initially a paid browser too?

Opera had paid versions, then ad supported versions.

Yeah, I actually paid for it back in the day.

> the side that steamrolled competition with their lower-quality software

That's not true at all, IE was the superior alternative (and the "standard-following" browser) when it steamrolled Netscape. The problem came after that and was a great demonstration of what happens when you give the keys to the kingdom to a single profit-driven entity.

I doubt anybody's learned shit though, considering how fast people jumped to a Chrome-based monoculture and started arguing for the blessing of any and all Google proprietary dropping.

You're thinking techies vs the average user who just uses IE cause it's there. The average user barely knows there's other browsers, or even that xp is no longer supported. How many people still use xp :(