Netscape 4 / IE 4 was the period when it was a matter of taste which one was better. In a lot of cases it came down to which one worked better on your computer. My overall impression was the Netscape was better when it worked but IE was more stable.

IE 5 was the version where MS pulled ahead on quality, because Netscape afford could no longer keep up. IE was already pulling ahead in overall usage because MS had begun using licensing to push Netscape out of the market. Still, I know few people, including myself, that preferred Netscape 4.07 to IE 5. IE 5.5 was pretty much the final push to IE, at this point only those that went with non-MS software on principle used Netscape over IE.

Prior to IE 4 there was no question that Netscape was better. IE 3 was the first version that was usable and that version sucked huge blazing chunks. It didn't render a lot of perfectly legal pages correctly, and crashed as soon as you hit anything complex.

Jay