Exactly this. There's a lot of historic revision that says IE was never good, but there was a significant chunk of time around IE2 and IE3 where it slaughtered Netscape on Windows. Better performance, less crashing all around.
IE4 is where ActiveX and browser bloat started to become more obvious, then IE5 was an improvement again.. but we were only a short time from the launch of what would become Firefox. By that point, people were tired of the constant IE issues.
At some point, I was using IE 5, then IE 5.5, then Opera and then Firefox 0.8! Used some Neoplanet as well, but I cannot remember when anymore, must have been before Opera...
IE 5.5 was great at the time, though mouse gestures and tabs on Opera were better.
IE4 is where ActiveX and browser bloat started to become more obvious, then IE5 was an improvement again.. but we were only a short time from the launch of what would become Firefox. By that point, people were tired of the constant IE issues.