There's something beautiful and odd about reading the page about how much "Windoze 98" sucks, in 2020, from a computer running Xubuntu with the fabulous Chicago 95 theme[1] that brings back the old aesthetic.
This theme really rocks. I've used it for quite some time.
I still miss some gotchas from Windows 95 UX (1 pixel width things, no overuse of shadows/highlights, concise color pallette, etc), and started to respect it even more after reading this article: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
>Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based".
From you:
>a desktop environment made with Electron today.
A browser DE would be great. ;w; A crossplatform shell with the same tray and file manager and everything? Wherein I can open a browser and play crossplatform browser games[0]?
What would really be interesting is a library that uses the browser for only the UI, and is otherwise basically language-independent. So like Qt or GTK except let the browser do all the gnarly platform-specific parts.
Then the UI is compiled to javascript, which means it's portable and looks the same on every platform, but you can actually write your program in a less brain-damaged language like Rust or Python (or C or whatever you like).
However, at least in Win 98 SE, PostScript drivers finally worked… sort of…
Fun fact: Up to NS4 / IE4, you couldn't print a JavaScript generated HTML output, which was a major restriction in the days, when "the Internet" was commonly printed by a assistant for the benefit of a higher echelon, for whom the Web mostly came on paper. However, for whatever reasons, with a PostScript printer you could. (Generally speaking, pages were reloaded and reflowed for printing and JS generated content didn't work well with printer drivers which did also RIPping. Apparently, the process was somewhat different with PS printers.)
> However, at least in Win 98 SE, PostScript drivers finally worked… sort of…
> Fun fact: Up to NS4 / IE4, you couldn't print a JavaScript generated HTML output, which was a major restriction in the days, when "the Internet" was commonly printed by a assistant for the benefit of a higher echelon...
Fun fact: printing web pages today is a PITA. The only browser which some years ago made a decent job was Opera. Firefox, Chrome and IE are total disasters.
There are probably a lot of period specific things that only worked in ~90s Windows due to the lack of alternatives and therefore the specificity of development for Windows. I mean, that's why there was a successful antitrust lawsuit levied against Microsoft.
[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95