Active Desktop was just a HTML desktop (it didn't animate the window forms) and it part of Internet Explorer 4 so quiet late into the life of Windows 95. Probably around 1997 if I had to guess. There certainly wasn't anything like that on Windows 3.x which is what people would have been using in 1993.

It did not make win32 windows animate when they opened or closed.

Edit: multiple people mentioned windowblinds. I used it too in the late 90s. My point stands.

There were third party addons that did some pretty crazy things. I don't know if animations were among them, but I do remember at least one that would completely retheme windows with different shapes and layouts, Windowblinds I think it was called.

Thanks for refreshing my memory. Those were pretty cool programs back then.

I definetly remember Windowsblinds too (and geez, it seems they're still around ...).

I was into LiteStep, which basically was a shell replacement for explorer.exe.

I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.

Here are some screenshots:

[0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-aug00g.jpg

[1] http://litestep.net/snapshot1.png

> I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.

Fun fact, Win98 still had progman.exe installed (from win 3.1 and earlier). I had to switch to it in system.ini one day when something in explorer got corrupted and the normal UI wouldn't load.

You could do that trick even in windows 3.11. I remember using central point desktop for a while: 3d look, virtual desktops, advanced file manager and a bunch of other goodies in the 3.x era.

http://toastytech.com/guis/cpdesk.html

It was bloated and unstable though, so I was glad to upgrade to windows 95.

Litestep was fun, especially for those of us that couldn't get away with installing Linux on the family computer.

I also used eFX, which was a free Windowblinds competitor that made it super easy to make skins, and released a ton of garish and ugly ones back in the day.

Holy shit, Litestep! That takes me back.

yup! I used it until Windows XP, before Vista made it kind of pointless.

Window Blinds did that and way more on Windows 98 and it was fairly popular.

Many free other apps existed that did similar things too.

Active Desktop was the first thing I disabled whenever I installed Win98 on a new machine.