Mind you, early IE was very competitive with Netscape. It was only after they had outcompeted Netscape and introduced the abomination that was ActiveX that IE became the shambling corpse of a browser that we remember.
Heck, some of IE's reputation is because of ActiveX applets that only ran in IE6 and kept being used for years and years. (Not that later versions of IE were good but IE6 specifically casted a very long shadow and held back the Web for ages.)