3 ms·

> It was Windows 98 that ruined the experience and thrill of "going to the network", because Microsoft decided that the web and the local desktop should merge i

> It was Windows 98 that ruined the experience and thrill of "going to the network", because Microsoft decided that the web and the local desktop should merge into a single, seamless experience. One weird side effect of this was that Internet Explorer and Explorer itself were integrated. At a time, you could set your desktop wallpaper to an HTML page. There were even "HTML apps" introduced around the same time* which I believe is still being somewhat continued today for Windows 10 widget development * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

bitwize 5y ago
Yes, local directory windows and such were rendered with the IE engine in Windows 98 as I recall. Files and directories became "hyperlinks" and Microsoft made a big stink about how they could be navigated with one click instead of a double click, "just like the web". "Push" was the fad; instead of visiting Web sites, in Soviet Russia websites would come to you. That motivated Active Desktop. I thought it was stupid and potentially dangerous because it misled users to treat the web and local resources equally, and put the same amount of trust in each. Of course nowadays, not treating local resources with the same amount of distrust we give the web is a major security fail, and that's why we must notarize and sandbox everything.
jeffbee 5y ago
Honestly I sort of miss the late-90s web/desktop integration features of Windows. There were so many different ways to hack on it. You could make an Explorer folder be a web page, of course, but it went way beyond that because there was so much magic and so little safety. You could program the browser in any language installed in your Windows Scripting Host, including VB and JS but also Perl and TCL and whatever else you wanted to use. You could invoke any Windows facility using its magic {UUID}, so you could embed the Control Panel in a web page. It was all fully integrated with the Windows database features, so depending on what databases you had installed you could achieve a lot. Access was common, if you had Office Professional, but anything you could describe to ODBC would work.
jbverschoor 5y ago
That was Active Desktop

bitwize 5y ago

Yes, local directory windows and such were rendered with the IE engine in Windows 98 as I recall. Files and directories became "hyperlinks" and Microsoft made a big stink about how they could be navigated with one click instead of a double click, "just like the web". "Push" was the fad; instead of visiting Web sites, in Soviet Russia websites would come to you. That motivated Active Desktop. I thought it was stupid and potentially dangerous because it misled users to treat the web and local resources equally, and put the same amount of trust in each. Of course nowadays, not treating local resources with the same amount of distrust we give the web is a major security fail, and that's why we must notarize and sandbox everything.

jeffbee 5y ago

Honestly I sort of miss the late-90s web/desktop integration features of Windows. There were so many different ways to hack on it. You could make an Explorer folder be a web page, of course, but it went way beyond that because there was so much magic and so little safety. You could program the browser in any language installed in your Windows Scripting Host, including VB and JS but also Perl and TCL and whatever else you wanted to use. You could invoke any Windows facility using its magic {UUID}, so you could embed the Control Panel in a web page. It was all fully integrated with the Windows database features, so depending on what databases you had installed you could achieve a lot. Access was common, if you had Office Professional, but anything you could describe to ODBC would work.

jbverschoor 5y ago

That was Active Desktop