On the other hand it was particularly for this stand-still of NS, why IE was on the throne. And this made HTML/JS effectively a proprietary standard, which brought web development eventually to a stand-still also.

When open standards enforcing browsers finally became available (and – saying this as a once ardent NS-follower* – what a buggy mess NS 6.0 was in the beginning!), it was essentially a political question, whether they would succeed or not (as they were incompatible to most of the existing web code base).

*) I used to code NS4.x-compatibility and open standards calls then, even, if I wasn't able to bill for these as clients were only interested in "does it work on IE, so it's fine".