@kirby @guenther @atom
You might be right about this happening earlier than in XP — I was never an avid Windows user, I don't think I even ever had anything newer than 95 and older than 8 on my personal devices, but definitely not in 95 — that one didn't even ship with IE, you had to download either it or Netscape Navigator — most probably why they decided to make it pre-installed, but probably in one of the updates. And it wasn't that tightly integrated yet.

@cvtsi2sd @guenther @atom
Yes, it was definitely possible earlier, but I don't remember Windows older than XP coming preloaded with links to external services. This is what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Explorer#Task_pane
"…a set of "Picture tasks" is shown, offering the options to display these pictures as a slide show, to print them out, or to go online to order prints"

@cvtsi2sd @guenther @atom
I can definitely remember this "order prints online", there might've been other "tasks" like that — like I said, I never was an avid Windows user.
There also was this Windows Live Essentials thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Essentials which offered even tighter integration with online services.
XP didn't come preloaded with it, but AFAIR, it was offered via Windows Update among optional updates.

@cvtsi2sd @guenther @atom
It was in the later stages of XP lifecycle so I doubt anyone was actually installing it, but they did exist and with those, XP looked very similar to the (mock) screenshot in the opening post. This Windows Live suite is the reason for this screenshot to not look that alien to me 😂