Actually, they had released a Mosaic derivative browser. They did have a product. Just no one used it.
They also put this patent out for licensing, but no one took them up on it, instead they just incorporated elements from the patent in their own products. (For example, they spoke to Microsoft. Microsoft turned them down for licensing, then turned around and incorporated the tech anyway in IE).
Seriously, if you had been involved in Internet development at this time, this would have seemed a perfectly reasonable patent and course of action.
It was not obvious when they developed it which way the winds were blowing. Most people were developing independent programs for items on the web. If you wanted to play chess, for example, you opened XBoard and pointed it at the server you wanted to play on. If you wanted to play Go, you did the same with GnuGo… People were rushing to develop their applications.
A lot of the hostility now is retrospective. Seeing how things turned out, then backfilling all sorts of expectations and assumptions.
