Yes that was a defense. Explorer.exe and IE were intimately tied together. Remember “active desktop”? You could make your Windows desktop background a web page. Crazy times...

I wouldn't mind that, actually. I could create my own dashboard/background.

Well as always, that can easily be done on Linux. There is even a widget on KDE that lets you do precisely that.

Please say more!

I know of that: https://store.kde.org/p/998902/

You can also make nice updating (but not interactive) background with conky.

With Wallpaper Engine or similar programs you can still do it. It's no longer a Windows feature, but they have enough API surface to make it possible for other software to implement.

Bare in mind back then was before "Web 2.0", there wasn't AJAX, responsive web design and any of the other technologies we now take for granted. And to add to the woes, most computers still weren't powerful enough to handle running Active Desktop. It was a huge resource drain.

Some of the other desktop integration features of Internet Explorer 4 were pretty nice though.

These days most desktop environments allow for desktop widgets and usually there's a web view widget amongst them. So you can still have your web desktop if you wanted. At least now computers are powerful enough, and the frontend tools are useful enough, that there is some arguable benefit.

This can still be done.

And I loved it!

I don't think MS said it was bundled in the kernel, but it is true that parts of IE are tied into the OS (or at least used to be) in the form of mshtml and jscript.

Basic functionality like windows update was implemented using websites and activex components. You couldn't run that with any other browser.

Actually you could, as long as that browser used the Trident engine. Microsoft could have easily shipped a dedicated update application that's just a simple "browser" locked to the windows update website.

To be fair IE crashing would take out the whole OS.

Back then anything crashing usually took down the whole OS

Didn't MS still argue they couldn't unbundle IE in the XP days?

It's a lame excuse anyway. They could have just hidden the IE symbol, deactivating auto-open with IE and it would have been fine.