Wow....

This can't be real 😂

@DLMousey AFAIK they havn't publicly stated that it is the reason (a person claiming to be a microsoft developer made that claim on reddit though) but there are a crapton of old code out there checking for "Windows 9".

https://searchcode.com//...

i.e:

if (osName.startsWith("Windows")) {
isWindows = true;
if (osName.startsWith("Windows 9") ||
osName.startsWith("Windows Me"))
return; // win9x/Me cannot handle long paths

so the Windows 9 name would definitely have caused issues.

Wow! Truth is stranger than fiction.

@g-m-f Yes you could, but microsoft can't since the problem is not in their code, it is in thousands of different third party applications and libraries (many of which are proprietary in house applications).

Breaking compatibility with badly written applications makes the OS much harder to sell since companies are relying on those badly written applications. (Microsoft has always done their best to keep other peoples shit running after an OS upgrade)

Couldn't they create a variable osName containing "ms windows 9" or something similar?

I just wish you are kidding, they were doing shit lately, but not this much!!

@crisz that would break applications that assume anything not starting with "Windows" is some flavor of *nix and it wouldn't help for applications that make the same check using contains rather than startsWith.

Ofcourse microsoft could probably have solved it differently(i.e push the problem over to Oracle since most of the badly written applications are written in Java) but when there is an easy solution which has no drawbacks at all there isn't much reason to not use it.

@jAsE It still has the word Windows in it though.