As a followup to the story from a couple weeks ago about a Windows 1 to 7 upgrade chain, the same intrepid explorer has upgraded from Internet Explorer 1 all the way to the latest version, just to see what happens.
As a followup to the story from a couple weeks ago about a Windows 1 to 7 upgrade chain, the same intrepid explorer has upgraded from Internet Explorer 1 all the way to the latest version, just to see what happens.
Operating Sadomachochistic News?
It’s the same instinct that makes people enjoy watching YouTube videos of skateboarders crashing spectacularly.
And if this or the other video, was about backwards-compatibility for windows: for some programs, that is non-existent. I have software that was released for XP, that only works with XP.
But hey, that software is now owned by Apple, and now sudddently the old versions don’t work on later versions of windows.. Sounds like microsoft tactics we have seen before.
Microsoft can’t prevent applications from hard coding dependencies on one version of Windows. We try really hard by providing documented, supportable APIs that we intend to carry forward for a long time, and tools to validate that these are used correctly. Any application can misbehave if it wants – assume the contents of an undocumented structure, or the behavior of an undocumented API, or just query the Windows version and fail out. Frequently when we find apps doing these things we end up bending the OS to work with them – every release contains hundreds of products where Windows will just lie about its version to specific apps to prevent them puking, and that game’s been going on since DOS 5.
But I promise, we do try really, really hard to keep things running.
My favorite:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci3Lv45GdAM
First I LOLed, then I felt ashamed.
He started this video mentioning that IE 1 was released for Win95, Win 3.1, and NT on the same date. This is not correct; IE 1 was Win95-only, and subsequently IE 1.5 was released for Win 3.1 and NT. IE 1, without support for tables, was always essentially useless.
Another interesting experiment would have been to validate that HTML/JS/CSS written for each version continues to work in subsequent versions.
What I thought was missing is that he should have bookmarked something in each version and tracked how far the upgrade cycle kept his bookmarks. Windows has been fairly consistent with the Favourites folder ever since IE4.