I'm with you. For years I had absolutely nothing positive to say about Netscape. They were pioneers in the browser market, then they pissed away their customer base with the neverending series of 4.X failures, all the while whining about how big bad Microsoft was running them into the ground.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but the fact is that the Netscape 4.X browsers were garbage. Flaky at best, with absolutely zero support for CSS standards, and it seemed like every bit of functionality was just some knee-jerk reaction to whatever MS was trying to establish at the time - usually the polar opposite, which resulted in a browser that was absolutely maddening for developers and designers.
And then came Netscape 6/Mozilla. Nice idea. They were on the right track, but they weren't quite there yet. More improvements with upgraded versions of Mozilla/Netscape 7. Finally, we get Phoenix/Thunderbird/Firefox. THAT'S MORE LIKE IT. Very nice...easy to use, very useful features, quick, stable, supports established standards (to a fault, actually), and tabbed browsing rules! My only complaint is that saving something as innocuous as a jpeg often results in the download manager launching, which is baffling to me since it should already be in the cache.
In any case, IE is gathering dust on my computer and is only used to test browser compatibility. Firefox gets my vote.
