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by DaiPlusPlus 3345 days ago
All of those scenarios you describe can be solved with appropriate application sandboxing and shimming.

I don't personally believe the "Windows 9" story - if a program is old enough to feel the need to check for Windows 95/98 then it should already be fine to run under Windows' own app-compat layer which spoofs the Windows version string anyway. I believe it's marketing-based out of fear consumers would see "MacOS 10 vs Windows 9" (like how it was PlayStation 3 vs Xbox 2 - hence "Xbox 360").
2 comments
nemothekid 3345 days ago
MacOS 10 wasn't rebranded from OS X until 2016, a full year after Windows 10 GA - and I doubt anyone outside a select few at Apple knew that the OS X line was going to be renamed.

In any case, your reasoning doesn't really make sense. I can run a program that was written for Windows XP on Windows 10 without the need from a app-compat layer. Given that a developer can hide/show all sorts of random functionality with an if-branch-on-version - the user will see a broken or strange app and it won't be clear (and MS probably didn't have the means to detect) that the app should run in compatibility mode.

I still believe that MS wanted to ship an OS that "just worked" and did so under 10, than trying to compete in version numbers with an OS that has had 10 in its name for last 18 years.

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frik 3345 days ago
> MacOS 10 wasn't rebranded from OS X until 2016

X means 10 in latin.

Look at old MacOS X 10.3 books, X always stood for 10.

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talmand 3345 days ago
Even your mac will say 10 if you get to speak out Mac OS X. But I have had many a people insist it was not pronounced as Mac OS 10, but as Mac OS X.

I could understand the confusion.

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carey 3345 days ago
Some of those programs would have been Java programs, where java.exe is modern, but the program is not. The definition of os.name in Java makes checking the string prefix particularly likely.
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WorldMaker 3344 days ago
Google Code Search, when last I was curious on the topic, turned up a lot of open source Java with starts with "Windows 9" checks, including some deep in the Java framework itself. It's hard to imagine there isn't as much littered in closed source and proprietary code. (Even probably code that never actually ran on Windows 9x in the first place.)
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