Right, so, in that period, IE stagnated, and so did Mozilla. But IE was the dominant stagnant browser and not Mozilla or Firefox. That's somewhat on the monopoly.
In much of those days I used Netscape 4.x and it really wasn't much worse than IE. Then I used pre-1.0 Mozilla and various forks, and early firefox, they were all pretty acceptable for the time. The big issue was that all the content was authored for IE and not tested anywhere else. Monopoly.
