[Zardoz84]

People begin to use more IE, becasue lazines and that IE was bundled with Windows. Netscape always was better that IE.

[CamperBob2]

Netscape always was better that IE.

No, it wasn't. Were you there when NS4 came out?

[vetinari]

Depends what sites you used.

Compared NN4 and IE4, NN4 was better. Compared to later IEs, IE were better.

Except for IE5 for Mac. That one was weird, it's CSS implementation was best from all the available browsers. But when you opened Slashdot (or another table heavy site), boy, you quickly switched back to Netscape.

[dep_b]

Netscape 4 versus IE5 or 6 was pretty bad. They got stalled a few years while rewriting their browser. Firefox was better than IE almost from the very first alpha tests.

[bigbugbag]

Netscape 4 was facing IE4 not IE5 or 6.

firefox was initially named phoenix and it was made as a workaround the performances issue of mozilla suite by removing everything unneeded to run a browser. Except mozilla suite fixed its performance issues way before phoenix was ready for prime time.

[dep_b]

True about IE6, but IE5 was already out before Netscape 6 came out. Funny that the real 1.0 for Firefox came years later.

[vetinari]

Netscape 6 was the "new one", with Gecko, XUL and stuff.

Firefox itself used to be an alternative - the main browser was Seamonkey, that included mail client, chat client and kitchen sink, just like the original Netscape did. Firefox started later as a lightweight alternative, just the browser.