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.
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.