Many forget that IE was basically the only decent browser for most of the early 2000's. It was the defacto standard. Netscape 4.x was ancient and crashed every half hour. Mozilla/Firefox wasn't stable yet. Chrome wasn't out.
I jumped ship when ME came out. KDE had a good browser (Konqueror), the engine of which is now known as WebKit and powers Safari. When I wasn't using Konqueror I ran NN or whatever Mozilla version they had in the day. It worked great but ran slow and was a huge memory hog.