The MIT Athena computer labs while I was there were 80% SPARC and 20% SGI. Despite whatever porting frameworks Microsoft had to glom on, IE for Solaris was still better than the pig Netscape was at that point.
The late 90's and early 2000's were a dark time for browsers. IE was basically the only game in town. Netscape was approaching unusable. I remember it having massive memory leaks and segfaulting every half hour or so on Solaris. Firefox wasn't out yet. Chrome was 5+ years away.
