GraysGhost wrote:

I fear that the tone of your post will appear a bit offensive to Hubert. I hope I'm wrong about it.

Anyway, indeed to connect to internet you don't just need hardware, but there's also a lot of pieces of software talking to each other, not just the browsers.
And all these softwares must behave friendly to each other to communicate properly
However, I think I can see why you and Hubert aren't understanding each other - I think you two had very different ISP experiences. I'll share mine, which is probably similar to Hubert's, at least in the final part.
I've had many different ISPs in all these years but I never had ISP software integrated directly into the browser as some of your posts suggest.
In my experience, a long time ago, even when some ISP software had to be installed on the PC, it was usually just a way to configure Windows' Remote Access and show you a different panel to put username/password when you login (it was basically just the same as Windows Remote Access login panel but with some ISP logo and colours).
So in these cases using ISP CD wasn't even mandatory, you could simply skip the automatic CD installation and setup Remote Access manually by yourself using the parameters provided by your ISP.
Once the Remote Access was setup properly, browsers would do just fine, with maybe one exception that I recall: if you had multiple dialups created in Remote Access, you had to tell IExplorer which one you wanted to use.
However, all this Remote Access stuff is about 10 years ago or more, Windows 98 and such
Back to 21st century, my ISP experience has been a lot easier: you just had to connect your PC to the gateway/router with an ethernet cable.
If DHCP is enabled, usually all computers will connect easily to the gateway like to any other LAN, without needing any extra piece of software.
The router (or gateway) so just exposes a "well known" way of communication (LAN with DHCP) to your PC, not some kind of ISP-specific interface, so no special software is needed.
That's why dcr66 posts talk so much about router/gateway problems and not about software problems on the PC.

Anyway, indeed not all ISPs are equal and I'm not that much surprised if you have specific ISP software on your computer, especially if your PC connects directly to the modem with a USB cable (is this the case?).