Up until IE5 I remember being a bit of leapfrogging from both sides. I'd use IE version X, then Netscape version X+1, then IE etc etc. So Netscape definitely faced situations previously where they were no longer the best browser. As you note, what really started killing them was IE finding its way automatically into nearly every single home computer on the market, and the fact that for many people "the internet" and "the blue E" were synonymous (Stories were legion of people who thought their internet was broken because the IE shortcut was removed from their screen).
As someone who hasn't used Windows since right around that time (I was Linux/FreeBSD only for several years until transitioning to OSX) that ushered in a dark area - there were many websites that I simply couldn't use. Their loss, not mine.
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Up until IE5 I remember being a bit of leapfrogging from both sides. I'd use IE version X, then Netscape version X+1, then IE etc etc. So Netscape definitely faced situations previously where they were no longer the best browser. As you note, what really started killing them was IE finding its way automatically into nearly every single home computer on the market, and the fact that for many people "the internet" and "the blue E" were synonymous (Stories were legion of people who thought their internet was broken because the IE shortcut was removed from their screen).
As someone who hasn't used Windows since right around that time (I was Linux/FreeBSD only for several years until transitioning to OSX) that ushered in a dark area - there were many websites that I simply couldn't use. Their loss, not mine.