Windows 98 arrived at the exact moment the internet was becoming a mainstream household necessity, and its design decisions reflect that transition in ways that shaped the following decade of PC use.
Internet Explorer Integration
Windows 98 deeply integrated Internet Explorer into the OS shell itself — a decision that became the center of a major antitrust case (United States v. Microsoft), since bundling a browser this tightly was argued to unfairly disadvantage competing browsers like Netscape Navigator.
USB Support That Actually Worked
While Windows 95 technically supported USB in later updates, Windows 98 was where USB peripherals became genuinely plug-and-play reliable for average consumers — a foundational shift away from the fiddly serial and parallel port peripherals that preceded it.
Windows 98 Second Edition
Released in 1999, SE fixed a substantial number of stability issues and added Internet Connection Sharing — for many households, SE (rather than the original 98) was their actual first real experience with a shared home internet connection across multiple computers.
Legacy
Windows 98 remained in widespread use well into the early 2000s, notably outliving the far more troubled Windows Me that nominally succeeded it in the consumer line — a rare case of an “older” OS being preferred over its official replacement by a meaningful share of users.