[Kwpolska]

Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility and does a good job at it IMO, especially compared to their competitors. The thing that broke was not a public API, but an internal, undocumented, unexported function in Explorer. Microsoft did patch API abuse in the past for prominent software, but they can't be expected to do it forever and for all software.

[JohnFen]

> Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility and does a good job at it

Indeed. This is one of the few points that I give high marks to Microsoft for, and when it comes to Windows, is the only thing that makes me feel sympathy for Microsoft devs.

Pulling off the level of backward compatibility that Windows has maintained for so long is an incredible accomplishment.

[twoodfin]

Software didn’t have to be that prominent to warrant a compatibility hack in Windows.

When I was exposed to the “shim” database in the XP era, it had thousands of entries.

[justin66]

I'm not sure if you're holding up the XP list as being better than the list today, but I bet even the list at that time did not include every random shell extension imaginable.

[twoodfin]

At the time, there weren’t that many “random shell extensions”. Many of the more common ones were almost certainly there if needed.

My point was you didn’t need to be a “prominent” developer for Microsoft to patch up your app at runtime. This was particularly important for XP, given that it was the big, strategic consumer swap to the NT kernel and had to go smoothly.