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Looking Back on Five Years of Windows XP
david.emery writes "In an article in the Washington Post entitled If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP, post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro points out the 5 year legacy of Windows XP. The article starts 'Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?' This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors." More from the article: "Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP. The operating system was meant to stop individual programs from crashing the system, and it succeeded. It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.' But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers."
Aye, that it was. Why? Because MS had deals with OEMs to keep their OS outlay to a minimum as long as said OEMs didn't use any other operating system. In other words, every fscking new computer sold had, and still has, a copy of this rot on it and people found they had to use it. After all, Joe Sixpack can hardly install any operating system from scratch without help.
Windows is the de-facto standard because MS's marketing department is the best there is. There's nothing technical about it, nor is it the vote of the end users. It's the fact that MS has the manufacturers right where it wants them: With their bollocks in its twenty tonne press and the salesmen, watching they don't break the agreements, ready to pump the handle by making them pay the "going rate" for the OS if they sell so much as one PC with another OS on it.
Dell was bloody lucky the n series with FreeDOS didn't bring the wrath of Redmond upon it. Of course, FreeDOS isn't much use to anyone these days unless you're flashing the odd firmware or two, so they probably weren't worried about Joe Sixpack discovering that Linux et al are just as simple as Windows XP when someone else installs it for him.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
Um, XP wasn't built from the ground up. It's derived from the NT line that began in the early 1990s. Additionally, XP's API layers (Win32, registry, etc.) are the same APIs dating back to the Win 9x line, which themselves date back to the original Windows 1.0.
There is much more that needs fixing than Internet Explorer, so much so that Windows developer Phillip Su called the codebase "overly complicated" and full of dependencies, many of them circular. There are hundreds of layers, and you may only ever understand two or three of them. It's so bad, that after a minor Vista refresh codenamed "Fuji," Microsoft wants to start with a rewrite codenamed "Vienna" and use virtualization technology to run pre-Vienna apps.
Of course, it remains to be seen if any of that actually comes to fruition or how long it will take. In the meantime, Vista is a mess both bug-wise and interface-wise. I count at least five different styles of menus and various conflicting dialog styles...some of them are the same dialogs from XP and even Windows 3.1, like the Install Font dialog. Don't even get me started on how many contradictory light source directions there are on the default Vista desktop's icons and interface. They quickly slapped Glass together to look like Aqua, and it's so obvious, even down to ripping off the OS X save dialog in IE7 all the way down to the disclosure triangle in the lower-left that reveals the filesystem browser. And UAC is absolutely horrible and intrusive, rather than the occasional password prompt you recieve in OS X.
I seriously fear for anyone planning to trust Vista on their machines with all its 1.0 APIs and untested technologies and further bloat on top of the aging Windows codebase. It's five years later, and we're still getting patches for XP and IE6, at an increasing rate, in fact. I have to admit to a bit of schadenfreude in anticipating how many pieces Vista is blown up into by black hat hackers on release, like stopping to watch a roadside accident..
"Sufferin' succotash."