They did lots shady things also, belt and suspenders style. Which is the subject here.
I started on gopher and Mosaic and Netscape was far ahead and good enough for a long while. Only until IE4 did MS pull away. Of course by IE6 the damage was done and they left the entire industry broken with a moribund dominant browser that took a decade to recover from. Rot in hell.
Making a much better product often does that.
You'd know what I mean if you were a Netscape user :-/