Really? I remember Netscape being hands down better than IE, but that might have been after Netscape went out of business and before Mozilla formed, so maybe around when IE4 came out in other words.
There was no Netscape 5, and Netscape 6 was an abomination. It wasn't until Phoenix (the Firefox predecessor) that IE had anything to worry about. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers