Why Microsoft really patched XP • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#51

Post by bunderbunder » Tue, May 06, 2014, 5:28 PM UTC

ntakasaki wrote: post #32

mikeash wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing seems to snowball. MS bends over backwards to preserve backwards compatibility, so third-party vendors basically have free reign to abuse the OS, requiring MS to bend over backwards even more to accommodate them, and on and on. Apple, for example, had much less of a problem with this even before the days of the App Store and the accompanying restrictions, because developers largely k…

The other side is that Apple is not preferred in many corporate shops exactly because of that.

And how. My company relies on a lot of in-house software that was built against Microsoft technologies from the 1990s, and are still supported. We have plenty of resources; we could port/rewrite them if we needed to. But that isn't cheap, and I imagine we've saved a lot of money over the years thanks to Microsoft's devotion to backward-compatibility on Windows. Not just development cost, but cost related to software defects we have not created because we've been able to leave already-working software in place.

(Web applications that rely on ActiveX, on the other hand. . .)

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#52

Post by bcbrown » Tue, May 06, 2014, 5:44 PM UTC

nivla wrote: post #40

twistedpair wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, but let's not forget page transition animations introduced by IE. Thank God those died a rapid death. The other thing that killed NetScape Communicator is that it had been costing $70 per copy. Remember... people used to pay for browsers.

>The other thing that killed NetScape Communicator is that it had been costing $70 per copy. Remember... people used to pay for browsers. Yes but mine came free with the ISP's installation floppy diskettes, which was very cool of them. If I remember correctly, wasn't Opera initially a paid browser too?

Yeah, I actually paid for it back in the day.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#53

Post by fragmede » Tue, May 06, 2014, 5:48 PM UTC

> Can you imagine the conventional wisdom for IE being, “Don’t use it, ever.

That is accepted conventional wisdom among most techies I know.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#54

Post by DanBC » Tue, May 06, 2014, 5:54 PM UTC

nivla wrote: post #40

twistedpair wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, but let's not forget page transition animations introduced by IE. Thank God those died a rapid death. The other thing that killed NetScape Communicator is that it had been costing $70 per copy. Remember... people used to pay for browsers.

>The other thing that killed NetScape Communicator is that it had been costing $70 per copy. Remember... people used to pay for browsers. Yes but mine came free with the ISP's installation floppy diskettes, which was very cool of them. If I remember correctly, wasn't Opera initially a paid browser too?

Opera had paid versions, then ad supported versions.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#55

Post by Piskvorrr » Tue, May 06, 2014, 7:33 PM UTC

jevinskie wrote: post #12

Piskvorrr wrote: post #2

Interesting idea, yet it doesn't quite line up with the facts, IMNSHO: IE on XP only goes up to 8, yet this CVE goes up to 11, and it's what, two weeks old? http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/emerging-threat-micros... - and guess what, the recommendation is "Do not use IE, at all, not even the new versions." Both the browser and its brand are broken beyond any repair.

"Do not use IE until a patch is released " is what it really said. The browser has been steadily improving its standards compliance with each new version. Yes, many people are using alternative browsers nowadays but I don't think that means IE is hopeless.

"Until a patch is released - sometime, eventually, hopefully: no clear date is given, and the track record says this same situation will repeat within six months."

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#56

Post by dblohm7 » Tue, May 06, 2014, 8:31 PM UTC

nivla wrote: post #48

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, MSIE was the best browser through version 4. The real reason Netscape lost the browser wars was that it became a huge bloated mess. Now it probably couldn't have beat IE regardless of how good it was because of Microsoft's monopolistic practices, but IE was the best browser for a few years in the mid-90s. Of course, they then proceeded to let it stagnate for the better part of a decade...

>they then proceeded to let it stagnate for the better part of a decade... That is one of the side effects of being on top without the worry of competition AKA being a monopoly. Despite Chrome being my favorite browser, this is one the things that worries me the most when everyone yells "Port all browsers to Webkit!!!", we will inadvertently repeat history. Southpark best visually described it in one of their episode…

+1. I try to figure out where the "Port all browsers to WebKit!" crowd is coming from, but the only reasonable speculative theory that I can think of is that they weren't there for the first go-round.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#57

Post by joesmo » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:49 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #53

> Can you imagine the conventional wisdom for IE being, “Don’t use it, ever. That is accepted conventional wisdom among most techies I know.

Yup. No need to imagine at all.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#58

Post by ygra » Wed, May 07, 2014, 7:33 AM UTC

twistedpair wrote: post #35

mikeash wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing seems to snowball. MS bends over backwards to preserve backwards compatibility, so third-party vendors basically have free reign to abuse the OS, requiring MS to bend over backwards even more to accommodate them, and on and on. Apple, for example, had much less of a problem with this even before the days of the App Store and the accompanying restrictions, because developers largely k…

There are many stories to MS doing this. There are actually tons of conditionals in the MS source and kernel explicitly to fix broken vendor code. Look up the SimCity fixes they put in the Win Malloc to fix bugs Maxis wouldn't so that upgrades wouldn't break the game, despite the bug being entirely Maxis' fault.

Such things are no longer fixed directly in the kernel or other OS code. They have shims that can be enabled on a per-application basis that sit between system calls and the program. Those can then fix such things, e.g. lie about the OS version, allocate a little more than requested to avoid buffer overruns, etc. Windows then ships with a database which application requires which shims; in Vista that included some 5500 programs.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#59

Post by jackvalentine » Wed, May 07, 2014, 8:55 AM UTC

the_hangman wrote: post #47

tormeh wrote: post #42

Just a nitpick: What features were lost in the transition from the start menu to the start screen? The start menu closes if it loses focus anyway, so you can't do other stuff with it open. Arguably, the start menu not being full-screen is a bug. I suspect this is just a case of people not liking change, no matter how trivial. Well, it did lose the off button, but other than that I can't come up with anything.

> Arguably, the start menu not being full-screen is a bug. A bug introduced in Windows 95 that they waited until 2013 to patch? I think after a certain number of years it might have moved from a bug to a feature. For me, the problem with the new start screen is exactly what you describe. I'm fairly scatterbrained. When I'm going to open a program, file, etc., it's usually because of something else I have open, like a…

I consider the context-switching of the huge fullscreen start menu the same as the "forget why you entered a room when you walk through a door" phenomenom.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-throug...