> even coming out of the gate pretty strong by dominating the browser market
They were out of the gate about as weak as could be, Windows didn't have a native tcp/ip stack for the longest time (remember Trumpet Winsock?) and they only dominated the browser market through grossly uncompetitive behavior after they had lost the initial 5 rounds of the battle.
That's a different definition than 'out of the gate' covers to me. Besides that, from those days I mostly remember IE as the utility to download another browser after a fresh windows install, and the thing that it was nearly impossible to get rid of. Not through any merit of its own, in spite of many non-standards compliant websites that favored IE.
They were out of the gate about as weak as could be, Windows didn't have a native tcp/ip stack for the longest time (remember Trumpet Winsock?) and they only dominated the browser market through grossly uncompetitive behavior after they had lost the initial 5 rounds of the battle.