When Netscape 1.1 offered background colors and fonts while nobody else did, it worked for Netscape, as developers put these in their pages and users installed Netscape in order to use them. When Microsoft gained the majority of the market, it worked against Netscape as developers didn't bother to support its browser and people switched to IE in order to view pages as the developer intended. To a certain extent, this is a PR trick that Netscape has to pull off. Microsoft is famously expert in developer relations, giving out free software, using training programs and certification to make its developers loyal to its products, even giving practical business benefits to developers that stick to its technologies, such as when it offered prominent placement in its Internet Connection Wizard for ISPs that, amongst other things, used IE-only features on their Web sites. This last bit is a bit of a gamble.
Nobody really knows which way developers are going to go, and it's the critical point.
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