Comment by petcat
3 hours ago
Netscape made mistakes, but they didn't lose 60% of their market share in just two years because they didn't ship a major update. They lost it because Microsoft bundled a "good enough" browser with their operating system already installed on the computers out of the box.
Well first off I remember Netscape of that time, it was a disaster, and this was the time when most peoples computer browser stuff was handled by their nerdy relative. I had plenty of people I could have put Netscape on their computers but I didn't because it was just such a shitshow.
So I'm not sure about that loss of market share being just due to MS. IE at the time was just better than Netscape. You had to be a masochist to use Netscape. It would crash badly at the silliest little things, and since websites were made with even less professional standards than nowadays those silly little things were quite frequent.
You might have gotten IE preinstalled, but even for devs who went and installed Netscape it just made more sense to use IE, because it was better.
MS preinstalled IE, but Netscape made sure only the truly dedicated would actually download and use it.
Without Netscape's mess-up I can totally see them only losing 30% of their share, and being in a good place to recuperate when MS got slapped down in court.