<i>At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure</i><p>Meh. IE was the browser with the best website compatibility, because Microsoft went out of its way to reimplement half of the HTML standard in its own way, and could use the prevalence of IE to make webdevelopers follow &quot;their&quot; flavour of HTML.<p>Mozilla&#x27;s first Firefox release came with the slogan &quot;take back the web&quot;. That motto had nothing to do with the excellence of IE.