Overall, lots of good points in your post. However, this one:

    > Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998

I am really dating myself here! I remember using Netscape pre-1998, and there is no way that I paid for it -- I was a broke uni student. (And, I don't think that I pirated it either.) Was I always using a (free) beta version? I cannot remember all of the details.