I agree, Mosaic was groundbreaking but when Netscape 0.9 launched in the fall of 1994 was like waking up in another century.

Or we could go back to 1991 with IRC, Archie+FTP, and Telnet BBS's on Wyse terminals or SparcStations. I'm very nostalgic for that era.

IMO Netscape 3.04g was the peak browser experience - and by far peak performance.

I remember when a friend who ran a business out of his basement got a T1 installed in 1997. Myself and several other friends were there the day Verizon hooked up the local loop. I did the first test on a desktop windows95 machine with Netscape 3. I typed "cnn.com", hit enter and BAM! the entire page loaded and rendered instantly before you could blink an eye. I fell out of my chair. On dialup it would take about almost a minute to download all the images.

Once Netscape 4 hit it was a slow downhill path of bloat. I have not been able to replicate that instant rendering experience since then.