Windows 7's adoption of online-only functionality dwarfs XP's.
Vista and Windows 7 are extremely similar. I've easily fooled several Windows 7 die-hards that they were using Windows 7 while they were in-fact using Windows Vista. They are virtually the same operating system. Microsoft did the same in a series of television commercials.
Spyware and application telemetry are not the same thing. I don't know why I continue to beat this drum, though, it never sways anyone, facts be damned.
The suggestions (yes, they are arguably ads) are easily turned off and never return, and this setting syncs across devices logged into the same Microsoft account.
No operating system is perfect, and no company is perfect. Is there any other fucking massive tech company in the middle of a huge turnaround like Microsoft is? I can't think of any.
Yet, many people will always have a very special place in their heart for attacking Microsoft, and they'll never relent, no matter what Microsoft do.
I do NOT understand it.
Windows NT needed way high-end hardware to be usable at the time. (Even Linux did, if you wanted to use a Win95-like GUI and not be limited to the text-only CLI.) Windows 95 was a hack, but it was still miles better than pure MS-DOG and 16-bit versions of Windows.
> Windows 98 ...introduced completely unnecessary IE integration and the Active Desktop nobody used.
Completely unnecessary? Used ChromeOS lately? Guess what, that integrates the web browser at a far deeper level than Win98 ever did. And Active Desktop-equivalent technologies are only coming back into use very recently, with things like Web Notifications, ActivityPub, Progressive Web Apps and the like.
> Windows XP ... looked like Fisher-Price ...
Except that you could disable the Fisher Price bits, either in XP or as late as Vista and Windows 7.
That's the entire point; it uses the web browser because the web browser became an operating system (in the "application platform" sense of the word, not in the "kernel" sense) in its own right, and ChromeOS is Google's attempt to follow it to its conclusion. This is categorically different than Windows' deep and arbitrary integration of Explorer.
Nope, Internet Explorer had its own "application platform" for the browser at the time, known as ActiveX. Of course ActiveX came with huge security drawbacks, not unlike Windows 9x itself, but OTOH it was somewhat usable compared to the security-oriented Java "applets". And ActiveX components did find some use in Windows 98, much like the web-based components in ChromeOS.
There's a reason why people say 2000 and 7 were the best Windows releases ever.