It wasn’t an OEM setting - it depends on your Windows 98 SKU and install options. I think the Active Channel bar was also hidden by default if your screen resolution wasn’t high enough - and it was gone by 98SE or IE5.5, I think?
That might be why - I've never actually used the first edition of Win98, only 98SE.
To relive the experience again, I just tried installing a VM from a 98SE retail ISO and besides installing rather quickly and booting up in around 5 seconds from power-on to desktop, the whole experience felt very serene in comparison to installing anything Win8 or later --- no continuous disk activity from a hundred background processes, no in-your-face adverts or notifications pestering you the first time you see the desktop, and no attempts at being cutesy or infantilising. You get one "Welcome to Windows" app that you can easily close (and it's a regular window, not a full-screen horrorshow) and elect to not show again, and the closest thing to an advert is a single "Setup MSN Internet Access" icon on the desktop. It doesn't do anything else until you tell it to. The OS behaves more like a tool, instead of treating you like one.
More amusingly, the IE5 icon looks remarkably close to the Legacy Edge one --- it's just as flat --- and the VM shuts down in around 1 second.
> no continuous disk activity from a hundred background processes
That's because the computers at the time simply couldn't handle that kind of load. Things like telemetry and feature-usage tracking would have been things in the mid-1990s if we had the spare computing overhead space and persistent Internet connections, which we didn't - but now we do - so we have them.
> the IE5 icon looks remarkably close to the Legacy Edge one --- it's just as flat --- and the VM shuts down in around 1 second.
That's because you're likely in 16-color or 256-color mode instead of high-color (16-bit) or true-color (24/32-bit) modes - the desktop IE logo has never been flat-colored, though the logo itself is flat-colored in many places in Windows 98, also lets agree that the IE 7 logo is the worst IE logo ever.
> and the VM shuts down in around 1 second.
That's because it's a VM on modern hardware - on period-correct hardware it will still take Windows a while to boot and to shut-down.
Though while Windows 9x does shut-down rather quickly, there's a reason for that: it doesn't have the same OS and filesystem consistency protections that Windows XP and later had: there's a reason we all typically reinstalled Windows 98 every 6 months or so: things break easily - whereas my current laptop hasn't had Windows reinstalled ever in the 4 years I've had it.
The quietness and lack of pop ups is what I noticed when I switched from XP to Ubuntu 9.04 back in the day. I couldn't believe how it just booted and did nothing.
