Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? I was under the impression that it was still the best image viewer in town, on Windows at least
It made more sense to go through the effort to install IrfanView when there was no image previewer built into windows, in the days of Windows 95/98/ME/2000. Those only had MS Paint, and I think some versions only supported bmp files (no jpeg or gif). Windows XP had an ok image previewer.
> no image previewer built into windows, in the days of Windows 95/98/ME/2000
Windows has shipped with an image previewer since Windows ME. You can see it in this screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/y1lj7x/winme_ima...