That was before we had Firefox, when the only graphical web browser available in most Linux distros was Netscape, which was barely usable. Also most fonts were bitmap fonts, not the nice scalable fonts of today.
The Mozilla Suite existed and wasn't that bad, even in 99/00 when I started using Linux. Konqueror was also pretty decent. The web also wasn't as central to the Internet experience then (irc, pop3 clients, and so on were pretty prevalent.) Most of my time in a web browser was spent checking slashdot, googling for things, and so on.