Windows 98 predated both of these, i.e. > to adding intrusive ads to the main system menu / search around the time Windows 8 was released ...active desktop's

Windows 98 predated both of these, i.e. > to adding intrusive ads to the main system menu / search around the time Windows 8 was released ...active desktop's channels[0] were basically ads in your desktop > GNOME’s example of powering “native” interfaces with JavaScript ...HTML Applications, ActiveScripting (with the JScript backend) and an embeddable MSHTML/IE engine enabled both JavaScript and "web views" in applications (in Visual Basic 4 or later all you had to do was to use the web control to get instant HTML rendering capabilities). With "active desktop" you could even use an HTML or web page as your background, e.g. back then i had a hacker-ish background with scrolling assembly code at the side (the scrolling was done via javascript) ala Terminator - though i disabled it after some days since it was using pretty much all of my CPU :-P [0] https://i.imgur.com/9AqdbdM.gif https://i.imgur.com/9AqdbdM.gif [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application