I forgot about that. I feel like everybody had an uncle or parent that would have so many toolbars that there was barely any space left for the page. That was mainly the results of using software that had those installers where you had to actively refuse the toolbars (and of course they just accepted everything)
I'm not talking about the maturity or quality of the software but the zeitgeist of the ecosystem. Vendors mostly made software for the user, who was the customer, not for themselves or advertisers to sell the user as a product.
Let’s not romanticize the old PC culture - most running Windows with some combination of viruses, bundled software when you were trying to install something else, many people had 10 tool bars on IE that were all tracking your browser history