I feel like these sort of articles really undersell the strategic importance of 98sᴇ and 𝓂ℯ as vehicles for distribution of IE 5.0 and IE 5.5 (respectively). More so for OEMs than for retail users IMO. Win𝓂ℯ makes the corporate strategy even more obvious with a few UI elements re-written as HTAs, like the Help & Support Center.
I had a computer with Win98ғᴇ, and getting IE 5.0/5.5 was difficult over 56k dialup when 20-something megabytes was huge and took hours. In fact IE5 was the first time I ever saw an installer exe that was just a downloader (“Active Setup”) to make the download size variable depending on selected components. I 'member exporting the downloaded files and burning a big CD with all of my favorite installers so I wouldn't have to download them all again the next time I did a clean install, which was a thing I did fairly often as a kid.
I had a computer with Win98ғᴇ, and getting IE 5.0/5.5 was difficult over 56k dialup when 20-something megabytes was huge and took hours. In fact IE5 was the first time I ever saw an installer exe that was just a downloader (“Active Setup”) to make the download size variable depending on selected components. I 'member exporting the downloaded files and burning a big CD with all of my favorite installers so I wouldn't have to download them all again the next time I did a clean install, which was a thing I did fairly often as a kid.
Compare some historic browser stats:
— March 1999, right at the time of IE 5.0's public release as a download or CD-ROM: https://web.archive.org/web/20070211145820/http://www.websid... (IE4 56.83%, IE5 2.18%)
— April 1999, still one month before the release of Win98sᴇ: https://web.archive.org/web/20070211145751/http://www.websid... (IE4 51.35%, IE5 8.96%)
— August 1999 with three months of Win98sᴇ bringing IE5 to every new PC by default: https://web.archive.org/web/20070211145548/http://www.websid... (IE4 44.73%, IE5 24.86%)
https://www.tech-insider.org/statistics/research/2000/0124.h... sez “Worldwide PC shipments surpassed 113.5 million units in 1999, an increase of 21.7 percent over 1998 shipments.”