You are correct. Their initial attempts were messy then too. By time the iMac G3 came around in late '98 the web was the #1 reason people were buying computers

You are correct. Their initial attempts were messy then too. By time the iMac G3 came around in late '98 the web was the #1 reason people were buying computers and Apple was marketing on how much easier their product was to setup for the web. Microsoft was truly remarkably bad at winning the race so they went off trying to shoehorn IE on Mac, which was a winning bet when the iMac became the #1 selling machine.