People just think of this control panel as "the IE browser settings" because people use Firefox and Chrome, which do embed most of a network stack (for portability), and therefore ignore most of the OS network settings in favor of their own embedded configuration-points.
Those are the OS web settings. As used by all OS services, e.g. BITS (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/bits/backgr...) and the Live Tile updater; and any app that doesn't embed its own network stack (e.g. Steam, most Mail apps, etc.)
People just think of this control panel as "the IE browser settings" because people use Firefox and Chrome, which do embed most of a network stack (for portability), and therefore ignore most of the OS network settings in favor of their own embedded configuration-points.