[theandrewbailey]

Windows 98 introduced Active Desktop, allowing you to use JPG wallpapers. In my experience, enabling Active Desktop would make everything slower, so I always opted to take the RAM hit on BMP wallpapers. It was even better if I could save the BMP in 8-bit and still have it look good.

[jonathanlydall]

Yep.

It's because Active Desktop was essentially running an instance of Internet Explorer rendering to your desktop, of course it's slow and memory intensive.

Disabling Active Desktop and the fancy views on the left pane of Windows Explorer made Windows 98 change from quite slow to super responsive.

[crummy]

Didn't Active Desktop let you set a webpage as your wallpaper?

Crazy times.

[protocolture]

It would let you just drop gifs on the desktop too.

IIRC I had (at my first job, at the age of like 12) a bunch of constantly moving mechwarrior gifs on my desktop. Timberwolf and Vulture for sure.

[fourthark]

All in order to prove that the browser should be part of the OS and was not at all gratuitous tying to defeat Netscape.

[geon]

Yes. I wrote some js to have a drawing of a woman blink her eyes with random intervals. Was fun but super distracting.

[pjmlp]

And the best lesson new generations got out of that experience was to ship a whole browser alongside the application.