Last time I checked the history books, Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXTCube to create the web. The Web was born on NeXT (later Mac), not Windows.
So as far as popularizing the web for the masses and developing the de facto WWW so many people experienced, I think the earlier DOS and other Unix browsers like Mosaic were more instrumental, with Internet explorer and Netscape really "birthing" the web we know.
In 1995 windows was at his birth. The majority of people used other protocols than http to explore the internet. I was searching for a DOS browser to run it on the university computer (DOS diskless) to see the new web. Then MS bought Spyglass (or something) and they destroyed Netscape by bundling IE with windows. Windows did not bring anymore the web to the masses than netscape, chimera and others did. They just happened (as today) to hold a monopolistic position on the market and exploited this position.
This is actually kind of an amazing story when you dig into it. Microsoft licensed Spyglass -- which was the commercialized version of the original Mosaic -- on a royalty basis. Microsoft's version of Spyglass was Internet Explorer 1.0, part of the commercial "Microsoft Plus!" package. But then Microsoft released IE separately for free, and when it was bundled with Windows, a bit of accounting sleight-of-hand treated it as $0 direct revenue (after all, it's just freeware they're not making you download separately, right?). So, the royalty payment to Spyglass became: $0. They still paid a fairly small flat minimum, but that was it.
Amazing: causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing.
Awesome: extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.
So, "Amazing" is not incompatible with "Despicable". It's like a magnitude without a direction (whereas "despicable" is magnitude and direction).
Amazing's common usage was too ambiguous for this topic for me. :)
>Quote : That is going to be the fundamental challenge in such a world, but we feel that there are ways. One of the ways I look at this is you can light an Android app or a PWA app or a UWP app on Windows in the future, or even today, for some of the new AI APIs.
Probably not, but there is some correlation I guess
My worst experience with Internet Explorer didn't even have to exist. Why did Windows 98 do Windows Update with Internet Explorer? Was there a technical reason why Windows Update had to be coupled with an open web browser session? My memory isn't that good but from what I recall it was really painful over dial up (technically up to 48kbps but in practice, you'd be lucky to get half of that).
Yes, it was so that Microsoft can claim that IE4 was an integral part of the OS and couldn't be removed.
At the time, it was indeed a gift and Netscape was already on its dying legs with Netscape 6, bloated beyond recognition
Windows in 1994 was not the kind of walled garden where Microsoft could have forced users exclusively onto MSN. When the web turned out to be the winner, Microsoft had to adapt and build their own browser; they couldn’t just tighten the App Store screws like Apple would do in a similar situation on iOS.