IE 4 was far and away the best browser in its day. Nothing else was as fast and as reliable. Netscape had devolved into a steaming pile of garbage which had horrible resource usage problems aside from being massively unstable. Other competing browsers weren't much better than netscape either. It wasn't until years later that things changed.
But Netscape ran cross-platform, without which the WWW would have devolved into a Windows-only niche product. And that would have meant the only tablets today would be running Windows.
I don't think that follows. Also, it's not as though Netscape didn't have it's moments either. There was a time where it was better, a time where IE was better, a time where firefox was better, a time where chrome was better, and so on. Time marches on.
