Heh, I got a computer at the end of the DOS era. For all of the things like that, a friend of mine guided me through. You might find it hard to believe but I had to wait 3+ years to even get the Internet at home after getting a computer, so my experience with browsers was mostly at school and a job I got in highschool. At home, I did get secret internet access against my parents' wishes by sharing that same friend's internet account creds and dialing in late at night. If caught, the excuse was always that I'd dialed into that friend's machine to download some files. Technically was true like 1% of the time haha. So yeah I didn't have real Internet access myself either, for a long time.
I remember editing a config/ini file to add the word HIMEM and setting IRQs manually for sound cards and things like that. Not sure I had to do all the steps you mentioned though since our first computer had 24 whole MB of ram. I think most people had 16 (or often 8) at the time!