You and the grandparents are thinking of a slightly earlier time. Yes IE jumped over Netscape massively in technical terms. Then Netscape died an MS, having mission accomplished, basically stopped touching the browser.
>>paol+(OP)
The problem wasn’t per se that MS stopped (having a stable platform that doesn’t change continuously is in principle a good thing), it was most of all the many quirks, inconsistencies and bugs that IE had.
>>layer8+te
Even among browsers with the same version numbers! I recall array.push or array.pop missing on some Windows PCs with identical IE6 versions. It had to do with the upgrade path that the PC took.