Netscape was a buggy piece of software back then, and when IE 4 and IE5 came out they were a breath of fresh air for the general user. This was mostly back in

Netscape was a buggy piece of software back then, and when IE 4 and IE5 came out they were a breath of fresh air for the general user. This was mostly back in the 28.8 and 56.6k modem days, and Netscape's caching of content was a joke: Resize Netscape's window and what does it do? It would block (single thread) and re-download the content (HTML, images) instead of using the stuff in its cache. You could wait 30 secs before you were reading your page again. IE would instantly (well, disk cache and then re-render) redraw the page - on most non-heavy pages, you could interactively resize the window with no issues. Netscape also inconsistently progressively downloaded content - something IE could do very well, making for a much smoother browsing experience. From a UI perspective on limited connections, the difference was like night and day.