Today, Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) owns close to 80% of the Web browser market compared to about 20% for Netscape. Five years ago, this figure was just the opposite. Seems as though Microsoft went slightly unchecked in their quest to become the 800-lb gorilla.

A long time ago my favorite browser was Netscape Navigator 3.0; after that, the franchise went south. Later versions of Netscape took forever to load and were very bug-prone. Why new versions performed worse is hard to pinpoint. I have a strong inclination to believe that Microsoft was engineering Windows to cause problems with the Netscape browser, however, this is not an incontrovertible fact.