[einpoklum]

> Browsers barely worked

They worked pretty well actually, AFAICR. Internationalation was a bit sketchy in some cases though.

> computers crashed constantly

You did need to be careful with Windows 98, for sure, but it wasn't that bad. Also, if you put in some elbow grease you could install Linux, which didn't crash (but had limited support for peripherals and for the latest graphics cards, and almost no games).

> the ability to actually search for useful things was limited

It is arguably more limited now than it was then, since commercial search engines did not manipulate the results as much.