If you wanted a bit of interface "smoothness" more complicated than roll-over image links, and you wanted to only have to do it once and be pretty sure it would

If you wanted a bit of interface "smoothness" more complicated than roll-over image links, and you wanted to only have to do it once and be pretty sure it wouldn't crash your browser... I don't think this is an indictment on browsers and how they "sucked" back then. Browsers did their jobs just fine as tools for viewing static hyperlinked documents over the network, but it was the huge level of adopters who wanted to build full application stacks on top of the web that necessitated browsers host a concurrent application platform beside the host OS, by any kludgy means necessary. In some ways, we have a Pyrrhic victory of sorts.