Internet Explorer was always faster, smaller, and more stable than Netscape Navigator. By IE3 it was a perfectly reasonable replacement for Netscape (and you h

Internet Explorer was always faster, smaller, and more stable than Netscape Navigator. By IE3 it was a perfectly reasonable replacement for Netscape (and you had to download it yourself). IE4 got bloated with all the Windows integration but was still faster, smaller, and more stable. IE6 was great -- it was not without issue but those were minor compared to the problems with other browsers. However, Microsoft just immediately stopped working on it and it would be 5 years before Microsoft released IE7.