Yeah MS was hot on COM back then. Even JScript was a COM object IIRC. Agreed Netscape also introduced their own incompatibilities too, but Netscape didn’t have

Yeah MS was hot on COM back then. Even JScript was a COM object IIRC. Agreed Netscape also introduced their own incompatibilities too, but Netscape didn’t have a desktop monopoly. Though I do agree that IE4 was actually a really good product. If I recall correctly even IE3 loaded pages quicker than Netscape Navigator 3. I really wanted to like Netscape Communicator but it was hard to overlook just how sluggish it was compared to IE. As for front end development, I mostly an sysadmin back then but I did have a few websites live (my first being publish in 1994). I even won in the JavaScript category of Planet Source Code (remember that place?) one month for a recreation of the Windows desktop using JS. But I much preferred writing desktop software to web pages (and I still don’t really enjoy frontend dev all that much even now)