[skissane]

> the average user these days is likely more familiar with unix style paths via URLs than local filesystem paths

The average user ignores the contents of the address bar. "That's all tech gobbledegook". Increasingly, browsers even hide its contents from the user, just displaying the domain name, making the average user even less aware of it.

> Also, most non-unix operating systems that don't happen to be made by Microsoft also use the forward slashes for paths.

What are "non-unix operating systems that don't happen to be made by Microsoft". Non-Microsoft operating systems in common use – Linux (including Android), macOS/iOS/Darwin/XNU, *BSD – are Unix-like, and hence I wouldn't really call them "non-unix" (even if they are not strictly speaking certified as such)

If we look at non-Microsoft non-Unix(-like) operating systems (none of which are commonly encountered nowadays), we see a lot which use neither forward nor backslashes for directories. For example, OpenVMS and RISC OS both use dots, classic MacOS used colons. Stratus VOS uses the greater-than sign, which it inherited from Multics. The IBM mainframe operating system MVS (nowadays called z/OS) uses dots to separate the components of a dataset name – although those components aren't exactly directories. (It also supports forward slashes in its Unix compatibility subsystem, but that wasn't around for the first 25 years of its existence.)

[naewonawonga]

>> What are "non-unix operating systems that don't happen to be made by Microsoft".

It's a pretty big list. To name a few:

Beos (and derivatives), AmigaOS (and derrivatives), GEOS, Commodore DOS, Temple OS, TRON, plenty of Real Time Operating Systems...