You're rewriting history a bit and forgetting that the OS support for international character sets was lamentable on Windows (no Unicode fonts for a start). If you had Windows 95 or NT you had to bolt on an IME for proper east-asian support and fonts and of course MS were first out the gate with IE to support their own fix. Nevertheless if you found your own font elsewhere Communicator could support it, witness the mile-long character set menu.
If you had Windows 3.1 it was an exercise in futility, as was most things.
Oddly enough in Japan where Macs were common because they had good built-in support for international languages none of this was a problem and Communicator was also popular.
I thought everyone downloaded it for free from the FTP site and clicked through the EULA, there was certainly nothing to stop you if you weren't an educational user (which in those days I was).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
