That's a good point... so don't make it default! Make "SetThreadLocale" or something work with UTF-8, so apps could switch one-by-one (this may not work with h

That's a good point... so don't make it default! Make "SetThreadLocale" or something work with UTF-8, so apps could switch one-by-one (this may not work with hooks but still better than nothing...). Add UTF-8 support to MSVC runtime, so at least fopen can be safe (people have been asking for it forever). Add FILE_FLAG_UTF_8 to CreateFileA. Have Notepad be able to edit UTF-8. But I suspect the real reason is there was a strong internal opposition to UTF-8 -- maybe it was seen as inferior to UTF-16, maybe it was NIH, maybe they hoped the world will change to follow Windows ways and to put BOM marks in each document... Oh well, I am glad they have at least changed now.