Because, yes, it was marginally better than what was available, especially on Windows. But the main feature improvements that drove that initial rapid adoption was Netscape ignoring any attempt at agreement over standards and adding new "trinkets" like background images etc. in each release.
And yes, they created Javascript, in a rush, but there already were other client-side scripting options.
They were important, but their importance is inflated by looking back at a timeline where they won. We'd have lacked none of these things without them. They were one of many, and they were ahead in terms of features, but not by much, and the pressure they were under also left a wake of chaos.
E.g., sure, they invented SSL, rushed it out with massive security flaws (that was a fun time... one of the gaping holes was that if someone ran Netscape on the same host they ran their e-mail on, which was not unusual, you could get a whole lot of the bits needed to cut down on the cost of bruteforcing the SSL key by triggering an e-mail bounce to help you narrow down current process ids), but there were prototypes of encrypted socket layers around for two years already by then e.g. see Simon S Lam's work on SNP [1].
"Nobody" used Netscape's web server - which wasn't developed by Netscape anyway (it was acquired from Kiva, unless Netscape had a pre-Kiva web-server I've forgotten) - it was way too expensive. It was a market leader, yes, but in a crowded tiny niche of commercial servers. I ran an ISP around that time. I sold packages to businesses, and we'd have loved to convince customers to pay for Netscape server software, but most people stuck with NSCA HTTPD, and quickly switched to Apache 1995 onwards.
[1] https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/simon-s-lam/
You can do something that creates a lot of changes in the world, but if your business model involves giving people things for less than it takes to produce then I don't see how that's a business. What are VCs expecting to get a return on their capital? What's the plan to actually make a profit? Is the plan just to get bought out at a stupidly inflated price, similar to your inspiration of Netscape?
Fully agree with you they would not have survived long if the AOL sale hadn't happened.
Or maybe I'm just putting words in their mouth.
What if the founders of MySpace are totally ok with its place in history and happy that social media under any name carries on their vision? Maybe they don't consider that a failure.
How did they actually make money? What's your equivalent?
