> It didn’t matter if I was using the market-dominating behemoth that was Netscape Navigator or the scrappy, fringe-niche new kid Internet Explorer: very little seemed to line up with the specification, and almost nothing worked consistently across the browsers.

Well I remember a significant difference in the early years of CSS. Netscape Navigator would frequently crash when encountering perfectly valid CSS while IE at worst would render it weirdly. Netscapes habit of crashing probably set back CSS adoption for several years, since you couldn't even introduce CSS as an optional enhancement.

I know a whole generation of designers loathe IE, but this is noting compared to the hate designers felt towards Netscape in the early years!