What are our thoughts about picrel?Was the Desktop Update (forced on Windows 98, relatively optional on Windows 95) good, or was it the second coming of Satan?Considering current global trends, tech of this era is what I will be able to afford.So I can choose between avoiding Internet Explorer altogether (the floppy installation of Windows 95 didn't include any IE at all, while the CD version forces IE 1.0) OR installing IE 3.0 on 95 and avoiding 4.0.Could also go all-in with Windows 98 and IE 5.5, but no, fuck that shit.So... did you anons like IE 4.0's Desktop Update?
>>109517395It let you set HTML pages as your wallpaper. it was available up to windowx xp and I remember it was crashy. i often started my computer to be greeted by this error message
>>109517416That's Active Desktop. Was bundled in Desktop Update, but the biggest difference is picrel.
>>109517395>Active anythingALL Microsoft Web technologies were trash. Every single one of them.
>>109517395This was Microsoft's first iteration of Windows 11's TPM hard requirement.IE 4.0 was a bloated mess, and the desktop update tanked the performance of anything but the latest hardware at the time.You could run Windows 95 on 100mhz and 16MB of RAM and it'd be FAST. Then install the desktop update and it would slow down by an order of magnitude.
>>109517395Going through files and folders was a lot less clunky than using the Explorer that shipped with 95. Hated 95's Explorer for it's "new window for every folder" UI, it felt like a poor imitation of MacOS's Finder (which was shit, too). Yes I know you could right-click icons > "Explore..." to avoid a mess of windows, that should've been the default file-browsing behavior in 95 from the get-go.Quick Launch was convenient. Being able to move programs and folders inside the start menu was convenient. Winkey+D was a nice alternative to the older Winkey+M/Winkey+Shift+M.Being able to put jpegs on the desktop background was nice. Same thing for gifs, even animated ones worked, too.Channels were an interesting concept but that was quickly killed off before we got fast enough internet to take advantage of them. You did need the extra horsepower for the new interface, though. My dad upgraded our family computer (pentium 90 with 24 megs of RAM) from 3.11 directly to Windows 98 the day it came out. I remember thinking everything about it being excruciatingly slow and glitchy. Around the same time my dad got a laptop with 32 megs of RAM and a 233MHz MMX CPU for work and remember 98 being a lot more tolerable to use on that.
>>109517395Its fine. One thing you need to understand is that the internet explorer UI is distinct from the actual html web view component. The IE UI is based on native win32 and it made sense to reuse this code for the file manager. Windows 98 does use actual web views in a few places but these are mostly optional. Also, one thing to note, the state of the modern web has colored win9x use for html. mshtml was incredibly lean and minimal, the decades of additional feature bloat added to html did not yet exist. Also mshtml used native win32 UI elements inside the html layout.
>>109517395Yes, it was cancer.BUTSo was the win 95 interface.Not having back and forward buttons when browsing filesystems is HELL.It's one of those few times where you just have to take the bullet. Sure, it sucked to have internet explorer shoved down the throat, but the alternative wasn't that great either.
>>109517416yea, I tried to boost usability of the desktop with a html page but half of the time it showed me this screen instead, making it useless.
Windows 11 moment had been tried in the past and it worked.
