Microsoft’s Big changes

I stumbled accross the Shipping Seven blog today… Its a blog from someone on the Windows 7 team who isn’t afraid to make their true feelings about Microsoft and Windows and general heard (all be it annomously ;) )

 Check out this interesting post off the Shipping Seven blog: 

In almost every Windows OS release so far, we’ve changed something major in the OS subsystems, to improve the Windows infrastructure. And that generally screws up application or driver compatibility:
Windows 95
Long file names - Application developers had to fix their applications to support long file names. (A good thing, though: What is in 1NTINPRS.AVI?)
Windows NT
Driver developers had to write drivers for a new driver framework because of the hardware abstraction layer. Actually, most of them just stayed away, and supported Win9x only.

Windows 2000
A major annoyance for driver developers, who could ignore the NT driver models up to this point. Win2k ran on NTFS, and had locked-down permissions - developers couldn’t install their application’s files in \windows\system anymore.
We were telling corporations to set up their users as non-admins on their machines, and for the first time, corporate users in were logging in without admin rights, breaking all sorts of enterprise apps.

Consumers just sailed past, on to:
Windows XP
Installed on NTFS on default - breaking lots of applications that were used to the wide-open, unsecured world of FAT32.

We were telling the dads (or moms) of the world to run as administrator, and set up non-administrator accounts for everybody else in the household. Pretty much nobody did that - they all just logged on as Administrator. A situation that almost every bit of spyware exploited.

Which brings us to the OS everybody loves to hate (that isn’t actually that bad) - the fustercluck known as:
 

Windows Vista
This time round, punch-drunk from all our security issues, the Windows team said: F*** it, let’s just lock it all down:
AUC: All your applications will run as non-administrator, even if you have an administrator account. No excuses. We’ve been telling you that you should do this since 1999.
A new graphics driver infrastructure: We had to protect the system from video driver crashes, as graphics card companies care only about performance, not stability.
Session 0 Isolation: No system service can directly create a UI. Lots of drivers and antivirus apps broke, but we fixed up a major security design flaw in Windows.

Written by Patrick S on January 14th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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