[wanorris]

Personally, I started out as a Netscape for Windows user thinking Microsoft had no chance of catching up to a competitor as nimble as Netscape. IE 1.0 was awful (basically a rebrand of an outdated Spyglass Mosaic), IE2 was a little better but still grossly inadequate, IE3 was just fine, but there was no reason to switch, and IE4 was legitimately better (in my opinion) than Netscape was at the time. (Helped by the fact that Netscape 4.x was a bloated mess.)

There is plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree, but my conversion circa IE4 was not an outlying datapoint.

[cyberguppy]

I started out as a Netscape for Mac user. I stayed that way until there was a viable alternative, and that alternative was never IE, no matter how much Steve Jobs stood on stage and said he loved it.

[tjmc]

That may be true for the Mac, but the vast majority of users were on Windows. And on Windows, IE would have won the browser wars on its own merits without Microsoft's dirty tricks. As the GP said - IE3 was better than Netscape 3 and IE4 was streets ahead. Netscape 4 was the worst release of a major browser that I've seen.

[whatusername]

Really? I thoguh IE5 was a really solid browser on the mac.

[DanBC]

IE on mac was created by a different team, and was very different form IE on Windows. It was a popular browser.

I have still to find anyone who actually used any of the IEs that MS released for Unix.