There was a period there in the early-mid 2000s in which an unfortunate number of websites, and rather more corporate / enterprise web-based tools (intranet or external portal) were very highly MSIE dependent. There were workarounds, and some of us stayed largely independent (absent a few VMs or Windows Terminal Server sessions), but it was fairly ugly.

The embrace of Web standards by major players (thank you Google, and I don't say this often, Facebook) and availability of cross-platform standards-compliant browsers (thank you Mozilla and Google), and even the resurgence of Macs (thank you, Apple) have helped.

That and the fact that proprietary application format usage for standard desktop functions (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation) has dwindled dramatically. I won't say it's gone by any stretch, but even Microsoft touts open standards, and far more often you'll encounter Wikis, Google Docs, or git.

He was also a Linux user in 1998.

The main difference seems to be that he now uses Google Docs instead of Microsoft Office, and thus spends more time in the browser.