It's because those things that improved stability were just being invented.
No browser had tab isolation. In fact, no browser had tabs.
Memory protection in Win311 (first to use the new v86 mode) and Win9x was intentionally weak to allow DOS programs to access hardware directly. WinNT/2000 broke sound in all DOS games and lots of other programs that relied on direct hardware access. The price of stability was incompatibility.
I ran Win98 until 2006 or so. Once I replaced all bad software and drivers, it was stable enough to not bother to turn off at night and do suspend-to-ram instead. I recently bought an Acer Swift Edge w/ Win11. It is so bad, it is not capable of S3 sleep. It won't even disconnect from wifi.
No browser had tab isolation. In fact, no browser had tabs.
Memory protection in Win311 (first to use the new v86 mode) and Win9x was intentionally weak to allow DOS programs to access hardware directly. WinNT/2000 broke sound in all DOS games and lots of other programs that relied on direct hardware access. The price of stability was incompatibility.
I ran Win98 until 2006 or so. Once I replaced all bad software and drivers, it was stable enough to not bother to turn off at night and do suspend-to-ram instead. I recently bought an Acer Swift Edge w/ Win11. It is so bad, it is not capable of S3 sleep. It won't even disconnect from wifi.