I’m not so sure...the Microsoft of 2015 clearly isn’t the Microsoft of 1998...IMO, Internet Explorer 4.0, per se, was a halfway decent browser...a bit ahead of its time, even.
Some of the strange bugs that characterised it were a product of the computers of its time; they hardly show up, if ever, on modern hardware; a 486 with 16MB of RAM was literally the *bare minimum*; you would be quite hard-pressed to run Windows alone *anyway*.
In an alternate universe where Microsoft did not resort to its underhanded business tactics, Internet Explorer would have won out anyway...as web developers started using CSS and HTML 4.01, it would have become quite clear that Netscape 4.x would become a train wreck. (It had a hard time rendering pages even with a minimum of CSS!)