5 ms·

> Windows would never sacrifice it's backwards compatibility. I wish I could believe this, but the way Windows has been trending since 10 leaves me skeptical t

> Windows would never sacrifice it's backwards compatibility. I wish I could believe this, but the way Windows has been trending since 10 leaves me skeptical that the old Windows philosophies of catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible are being smothered by whoever the fuck is working on it today.

mumblemumble 6y ago
Windows has always been two creatures that behave in very different ways. The server line is where you see stability and compatibility reign supreme. On the desktop/workstation line though, let's take a trip down memory lane and remember all these upgrades together: Windows 3.11 -> 95 -> 98 -> Me -> XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10. I am having a really hard time seeing how one can infer from that timeline that Microsoft's desktop OS line follows a philosophy of "catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible." Windows 98 didn't cause much hassle, but, at least from my experience, that was really it. Windows 7 had its share of hassles, too. Particularly, as I recall, in the backwards compatibility department. We just remember it fondly because it was sandwiched in between Windows Vista and Windows 8.
- ezconnect 6y ago
  Hardware support was always an issue on every version of windows but on the software side the only time I had software compatibility issue was whenI moved to Windows 2000. Windows vista for me was just a bad PR management by Microsoft.
  - vezycash 6y ago
    I place the blame mainly on penny pinching OEMs who sold windows XP hardware and slapped vista capable logo on it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  3.11 to 95 was a big shift in terms of how the interface worked, but after that it was pretty damned consistent until 8 tried to turn everything into a tablet. The introduction of WDDM along with the new sound and networking driver architectures caused some headache in Vista, but were ultimately significant improvements over the way things had been. 10, on the other hand, made automatic updates mandatory, and pushed itself on everybody through dark patterns. It puts ads in the start menu and on the lock screen. It started, but didn't finish, implementing new interfaces nobody asked for while deprecating the old ones they still hand't entirely replicated. Today, they're doing their damnedest to hide the fact that you don't need a Microsoft account to set up your computer.
  - ROARosen 6y ago
    We should - though - definitely appreciate the fact that they still "let" you setup a workstation without signing in to a Microsoft account (unlike iOS, the new Oculus device etc.)
    - djxfade 6y ago
      You can setup iOS devices without an Apple ID if that is what you are trying to imply.
      - danhor 6y ago
        You can, but apart from calling & web browsing, it's not that useful, in contrast to a windows machine (i guess you probably can't use the windows store)
        jsmith45 6y ago
        The Windows Store (now called the Microsoft Store, apparently to match the name o their physical stores), does allow one yo download free programs without using a Microsoft Account. I'm guessing you might need one for paid programs, but I've literally never tried, since this is a PC, not a phone/tablet.
        6y ago
- thomasz 6y ago
  Windows is light years ahead in this department compared to any alternative. It's a hard problem.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >I am having a really hard time seeing how one can infer from that timeline that Microsoft's desktop OS line follows a philosophy of "catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible." In the simple sense that you can run ancient Win 95 applications in any of these later versions (if not 3.11 and DOS too).
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    >> you can run ancient Win 95 applications in any of these later versions In theory, according to MS. In reality we all have seen old applications die when windows updates. Security-related applications are notorious for this. What once worked perfectly well with Win8 now goes into total panic mode when it sees Win10 doing its thing in unexpected ways.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >In reality we all have seen old applications die when windows updates. Security-related applications are notorious for this. I wouldn't expect "security related" applications to work (e.g. some antivirus), as they use bizarro / too low level APIs. But you can still run 15+ year old games, office apps, and whatever...
- Njikl 6y ago
  I'm not sure how you're having a hard time. Yes, Microsoft releases new OS versions. I'm not sure what you think that has to do with backwards compatibility. Have you not heard any of the stories about all the hacks Microsoft has had to implement over the past decades to ensure that third-party applications function correctly? A program made for Win95 will generally work seamlessly on W10. Worst-case scenario, you'll need to change compatibility settings or configure exceptions in things like exploit protection. The same can't be said for Linux, where the only thing you can count on is the kernel's ABI.
- dublin 6y ago
  Your chain breaks between Me and XP, because you omitted Win2K. And that's a huge change - It was the point at which they switched to the NT kernel from the previous DOS-based ones. While MS hasn't always done a great job on all of the OS functionality surrounding the kernel (though it's quite good now), the internals of the NT kernel are and always have always been excellent, and IMO, are considerably superior to Linux' kernel internals. One reason for this, interestingly, is that NT had less of a past to deal with - it was a clean-sheet design by one of the most experienced OS kernel designers on the planet (David Cutler, from DEC) - Linux was still trying to be "Unix-like" and maintain (more or less) POSIX compatibility (though to be fair, POSIX didn't show up until about the time Linux grew out of its hobbyist toy phase...)
daniel-thompson 6y ago
Because a large portion of Windows' target market is people who are technically unsophisticated, and who will blame Microsoft if an application misbehaves after a Windows upgrade (regardless of whether the application vendor is actually at fault), Microsoft goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure backwards compatibility, even to the point of adding dummy code that allows [poorly-written programs that abuse features in Windows X] to still work in Windows X + 1, even when those features aren't there anymore. - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030828-00/?p=42753 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030828-00/?p=42... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050118-00/?p=36673 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050118-00/?p=36... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051026-44/?p=33613 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051026-44/?p=33... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32723 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060110-17/?p=32703 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060110-17/?p=32... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070723-00/?p=25903 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070723-00/?p=25... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200526-00/?p=103794 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200526-00/?p=10...
- thunderbong 6y ago
  Sometimes I wonder where the world of computers would have been if it had not been for Microsoft doing all this stuff! This is seriously next level of customer support, which we hardly get to appreciate, let alone know about.
- taneq 6y ago
  Notice that only one of those articles is set later than 2007, and that the one later article is about telling the customer to buck up and deal with the broken backwards compatibility. They had an incredible focus on backwards compatibility. That no longer seems to be the case.
  - smileybarry 6y ago
    They still do. I have Win95 games that were broken in WinXP but started working in Win7 x64, or ones that broke in Win7 x64 and started working again in Win10.
pjmlp 6y ago
The whole point of Project Reunion is to drop some of those ideas and get back on track with a Windows 7 like development stack, just with an improved runtime tooling (UWP). And in about 10 years pretend that the road started by Sinosfky on Windows 8 never happened.
dheera 6y ago
> Windows would never sacrifice it's backwards compatibility. They wouldn't necessarily need to sacrifice backwards compatibility. They would just have to ensure that the new OS fully supports all of their APIs from the past. Imagine Wine but 10 times better, built into the OS natively, and built by 500 engineers with full-time pay. I'm sure it could be pulled off, if they wanted to. But they probably don't want to.
- nikanj 6y ago
  What you're describing are the Windows compatibility mitigations patches. Windows 10 emulates a tremendous number of quirks and glitches from earlier versions of Windows. Fifteen years ago they were already knee-deep in patches ( http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplechapter/Chen_bonus_ch01.pdf http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplech... ), and the importance of backwards compatibility has not diminished since.
  - dheera 6y ago
    I wonder why they can't just take the Android approach and let each .exe define an API level that it wants to have, and then never change how that version of the API behaves, just release new versions and let apps update their code on their own schedule. I feel like they shouldn't be knee-deep in patches if they do that ... but I'm not familiar with Windows development at all.
    - nikanj 6y ago
      https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/win7appqual/compatibility---application-manifest https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/win7appqual/c... They did add that. With the initial Windows 7 release. In 2009.
- donio 6y ago
  > Imagine Wine but 10 times better I have a hard time doing that, Wine is already so good. I can certainly imagine better but even 2x better is kinda hard to picture.
pitterpatter 6y ago
Oh the backwards compat attitude goes quite far. Even to the extent that shims are added in updates just to make sure old apps keep working in cases where the vendor can't realistically update all client machines.

mumblemumble 6y ago

Windows has always been two creatures that behave in very different ways. The server line is where you see stability and compatibility reign supreme. On the desktop/workstation line though, let's take a trip down memory lane and remember all these upgrades together: Windows 3.11 -> 95 -> 98 -> Me -> XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10. I am having a really hard time seeing how one can infer from that timeline that Microsoft's desktop OS line follows a philosophy of "catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible." Windows 98 didn't cause much hassle, but, at least from my experience, that was really it. Windows 7 had its share of hassles, too. Particularly, as I recall, in the backwards compatibility department. We just remember it fondly because it was sandwiched in between Windows Vista and Windows 8.

ezconnect 6y ago
Hardware support was always an issue on every version of windows but on the software side the only time I had software compatibility issue was whenI moved to Windows 2000. Windows vista for me was just a bad PR management by Microsoft.
- vezycash 6y ago
  I place the blame mainly on penny pinching OEMs who sold windows XP hardware and slapped vista capable logo on it.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
3.11 to 95 was a big shift in terms of how the interface worked, but after that it was pretty damned consistent until 8 tried to turn everything into a tablet. The introduction of WDDM along with the new sound and networking driver architectures caused some headache in Vista, but were ultimately significant improvements over the way things had been. 10, on the other hand, made automatic updates mandatory, and pushed itself on everybody through dark patterns. It puts ads in the start menu and on the lock screen. It started, but didn't finish, implementing new interfaces nobody asked for while deprecating the old ones they still hand't entirely replicated. Today, they're doing their damnedest to hide the fact that you don't need a Microsoft account to set up your computer.
- ROARosen 6y ago
  We should - though - definitely appreciate the fact that they still "let" you setup a workstation without signing in to a Microsoft account (unlike iOS, the new Oculus device etc.)
  - djxfade 6y ago
    You can setup iOS devices without an Apple ID if that is what you are trying to imply.
    - danhor 6y ago
      You can, but apart from calling & web browsing, it's not that useful, in contrast to a windows machine (i guess you probably can't use the windows store)
      - jsmith45 6y ago
        The Windows Store (now called the Microsoft Store, apparently to match the name o their physical stores), does allow one yo download free programs without using a Microsoft Account. I'm guessing you might need one for paid programs, but I've literally never tried, since this is a PC, not a phone/tablet.
      - 6y ago
thomasz 6y ago
Windows is light years ahead in this department compared to any alternative. It's a hard problem.
coldtea 6y ago
>I am having a really hard time seeing how one can infer from that timeline that Microsoft's desktop OS line follows a philosophy of "catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible." In the simple sense that you can run ancient Win 95 applications in any of these later versions (if not 3.11 and DOS too).
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> you can run ancient Win 95 applications in any of these later versions In theory, according to MS. In reality we all have seen old applications die when windows updates. Security-related applications are notorious for this. What once worked perfectly well with Win8 now goes into total panic mode when it sees Win10 doing its thing in unexpected ways.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >In reality we all have seen old applications die when windows updates. Security-related applications are notorious for this. I wouldn't expect "security related" applications to work (e.g. some antivirus), as they use bizarro / too low level APIs. But you can still run 15+ year old games, office apps, and whatever...
Njikl 6y ago
I'm not sure how you're having a hard time. Yes, Microsoft releases new OS versions. I'm not sure what you think that has to do with backwards compatibility. Have you not heard any of the stories about all the hacks Microsoft has had to implement over the past decades to ensure that third-party applications function correctly? A program made for Win95 will generally work seamlessly on W10. Worst-case scenario, you'll need to change compatibility settings or configure exceptions in things like exploit protection. The same can't be said for Linux, where the only thing you can count on is the kernel's ABI.
dublin 6y ago
Your chain breaks between Me and XP, because you omitted Win2K. And that's a huge change - It was the point at which they switched to the NT kernel from the previous DOS-based ones. While MS hasn't always done a great job on all of the OS functionality surrounding the kernel (though it's quite good now), the internals of the NT kernel are and always have always been excellent, and IMO, are considerably superior to Linux' kernel internals. One reason for this, interestingly, is that NT had less of a past to deal with - it was a clean-sheet design by one of the most experienced OS kernel designers on the planet (David Cutler, from DEC) - Linux was still trying to be "Unix-like" and maintain (more or less) POSIX compatibility (though to be fair, POSIX didn't show up until about the time Linux grew out of its hobbyist toy phase...)

daniel-thompson 6y ago

Because a large portion of Windows' target market is people who are technically unsophisticated, and who will blame Microsoft if an application misbehaves after a Windows upgrade (regardless of whether the application vendor is actually at fault), Microsoft goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure backwards compatibility, even to the point of adding dummy code that allows [poorly-written programs that abuse features in Windows X] to still work in Windows X + 1, even when those features aren't there anymore. - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030828-00/?p=42753 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030828-00/?p=42... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050118-00/?p=36673 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050118-00/?p=36... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051026-44/?p=33613 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051026-44/?p=33... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32723 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060110-17/?p=32703 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060110-17/?p=32... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070723-00/?p=25903 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070723-00/?p=25... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200526-00/?p=103794 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200526-00/?p=10...

thunderbong 6y ago
Sometimes I wonder where the world of computers would have been if it had not been for Microsoft doing all this stuff! This is seriously next level of customer support, which we hardly get to appreciate, let alone know about.
taneq 6y ago
Notice that only one of those articles is set later than 2007, and that the one later article is about telling the customer to buck up and deal with the broken backwards compatibility. They had an incredible focus on backwards compatibility. That no longer seems to be the case.
- smileybarry 6y ago
  They still do. I have Win95 games that were broken in WinXP but started working in Win7 x64, or ones that broke in Win7 x64 and started working again in Win10.

pjmlp 6y ago

The whole point of Project Reunion is to drop some of those ideas and get back on track with a Windows 7 like development stack, just with an improved runtime tooling (UWP). And in about 10 years pretend that the road started by Sinosfky on Windows 8 never happened.

dheera 6y ago

> Windows would never sacrifice it's backwards compatibility. They wouldn't necessarily need to sacrifice backwards compatibility. They would just have to ensure that the new OS fully supports all of their APIs from the past. Imagine Wine but 10 times better, built into the OS natively, and built by 500 engineers with full-time pay. I'm sure it could be pulled off, if they wanted to. But they probably don't want to.

nikanj 6y ago
What you're describing are the Windows compatibility mitigations patches. Windows 10 emulates a tremendous number of quirks and glitches from earlier versions of Windows. Fifteen years ago they were already knee-deep in patches ( http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplechapter/Chen_bonus_ch01.pdf http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplech... ), and the importance of backwards compatibility has not diminished since.
- dheera 6y ago
  I wonder why they can't just take the Android approach and let each .exe define an API level that it wants to have, and then never change how that version of the API behaves, just release new versions and let apps update their code on their own schedule. I feel like they shouldn't be knee-deep in patches if they do that ... but I'm not familiar with Windows development at all.
  - nikanj 6y ago
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/win7appqual/compatibility---application-manifest https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/win7appqual/c... They did add that. With the initial Windows 7 release. In 2009.
donio 6y ago
> Imagine Wine but 10 times better I have a hard time doing that, Wine is already so good. I can certainly imagine better but even 2x better is kinda hard to picture.

pitterpatter 6y ago

Oh the backwards compat attitude goes quite far. Even to the extent that shims are added in updates just to make sure old apps keep working in cases where the vendor can't realistically update all client machines.