ie quickly became revolutionarily better than the alternatives at the time.

My team at the time held contests to find the shortest html that would crash Netscape. There was a hallway at the office with over 100 Netscape crashers printed out and pinned to the wall.

By the time ie5 was released, almost 1/3 of the frontend code existed to work around netscape bugs. It was standard for us to fingerprint point releases of netscape to work around bugs.