Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 16, 2022 15:12 UTC (Wed) by mattrose (guest, #19610)
Parent article: Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

I'm reminded of the reason why Windows went from 8 to 10. Too many people had assumed a windows version that started with 9 to mean 95, or 98, and it would break too much stuff to not skip 9 with the new versioning scheme.

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Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 16, 2022 16:00 UTC (Wed) by unilynx (guest, #114305) [Link] (8 responses)

Was that ever a real thing ? Windows 95 would have reported its version as 4.xx in API calls, "Windows 95" was just its marketing name.

Windows 9X

Posted Feb 16, 2022 18:36 UTC (Wed) by stephen.pollei (subscriber, #125364) [Link]

From what I heard it depended on what API the program used. You are correct that there were APIs that gave an internal version number that was pretty sane. There was also an API call that gave what was suppose to be human readable. Allegedly, there was a lot of code in the wild that did : if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9")) { /* 95 and 98 */ } else {} . OperatingSystem.VersionString Property versus GetVersionEx()

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 16, 2022 19:17 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

You either weren't there or have forgotten about what was happening back then.

Yes, Windows 95 reported version 4.xx, but so did Windows NT 4.0 and they required wildly different code in many places.

The story repeats today with Windows 11. Apparently it reports the exact same version as Windows 10 just the build version is different.

Which means that we have, now, frozen Windows version and soon will need to invent another way to distinguish builds.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 2:42 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (3 responses)

Microsoft optimistically believes that people will stop using Windows 10 no later than October 2025. Or at least, that's what they say in public, anyway. I'm sure there will be long-term support for banks and other people with more money than sense, but that support will likely be just security patches and other critical updates. I'm not sure if they need to bump the version number for such updates...

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 9:44 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Times when updates carried a sensimble major version numbers have come and gone. But till now different versions of Windows carried different minor versions. Windows 10 and Windows 11 carry the same major and minor versions, only build number is different.

The one which is usually updated each time CI system builds new image. The last Windows 10 version carries build number 19044 while Windows 11 release is 22000. At least there are a gap. But the whole thing is still stupid, they could have, at least, changed minor version number.

The official position is “developers shouldn't care about differences”. But of course developers do care because other people insist on that (e.g. they want to see where Windows 10 is installed and where Windows 11 is installed because they come with different licenses and different support periods). So now they are looking on build numbers. What's next? Neural networks to distinguish different versions of Windows?

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 18, 2022 9:53 UTC (Fri) by beagnach (guest, #32987) [Link] (1 responses)

> Windows 10 and Windows 11 carry the same major and minor versions, only build number is different.

But.. but... WHY???

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 18, 2022 10:15 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I'm 99% sure that's to ensure old drivers and, more importantly, old driver installers work.

I have friend who uses Windows 11 on Lenovo ThinkPad 430s. That's 10 years old model by now. You can not, officially, install Windows on it but Rufus can alter install image and then it's installable. Everything works perfectly (except for some DRM feature which actually require TPM 2.0, I guess, but my friend had no need for them).

After installation it pulls drivers for all exotic hardware from Windows Update and everything works. All drivers predate Windows 11 creation and I suspect some would try to check both major and minor version of Windows during installation.

Thus hole was dug deeper and now build numbers only distinguish Windows 10 and 11.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 22:20 UTC (Thu) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

(I work for Microsoft, but don't have insider knowledge about this).

I think it was mostly a marketing thing, Windows is totally happy to lie to you about its version, and there is no API to get the "marketing" version (like, 10, 11, 8, 8.1, etc) afaik, there is only a way to ask if you _are_ a particular marketing version. You can get them as strings but have to associate things yourself or really go digging around. And Windows is happy to lie about registry and file system content to you as well.

If you don't manifest your app I think all these APIs will tell you you're on windows 8 by default

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 19, 2022 15:43 UTC (Sat) by jrtc27 (subscriber, #107748) [Link]

Some Java things do https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%22Windows+9%22&.... Whether or not those matter is a different question.