I'd say it depends on the features: smooth scrolling was pretty cool at the time (1998/1999), so to me, a nicer and faster UI made a huge difference given other

I'd say it depends on the features: smooth scrolling was pretty cool at the time (1998/1999), so to me, a nicer and faster UI made a huge difference given other user experience improvements as well. Also, Netscape was extremely buggy as well: I remember moving friends and family to IE as it was a much better experience in general. For example, one very annoying bug (given the slow downloads at 28.8) was Netscape would often not use its cache for certain code paths and would re-download files again, even if it had them in its cache. In particular window resizing would cause it to re-download files for no reason (this was obviously well before anything like responsive layouts, or imgsrc), and you'd often wait 30-40 seconds to see the page again. Similarly, I seem to remember IE's "offline mode" worked almost perfectly from the cache and you could revisit pages when not dialed up, but Netscape often would not show anything. (Obviously there were other ways of handling this, like Teleport Pro to download entire sites, but it was convenient IE's features generally just worked from a user perspective).