Hacker News Reader

Comment by coderjames | Hacker News Reader

> uninstalling user-installed apps

I ran into this when the Windows 10 Anniversary Update rolled out. In my case the program Microsoft uninstalled was a Start Menu replacement, so I didn't actually have a functional start menu for several hours after the upgrade until I got the updated version of the 3rd-party program installed.

This left me shocked, dumbfounded, speechless, and furious. Everything I've observed over the last 20 years says Microsoft honours backwards compatibility above all else. Raymond Chen has great blog posts about the huge efforts they used to go through. My understanding is that's why businesses have stuck with Windows; it'll keep running their 10, 15 ,20 year old legacy VB line-of-business apps even on their newest OS. Apparently Microsoft has now decided to throw out backwards compatibility? I don't understand this decision.

View on HN

These start menu replacements hook into the OS shell on a low level, keeping the old incompatible version installed would (and has, in older versions of Win10) cause the user to _have no task bar, start menu or anything whatsoever_ because the start menu replacement crashes and burns, taking Explorer with it.

See also a similar comment[0] I wrote a while back about the policy to uninstall incompatible software.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12416422

Not defending Microsoft's behaviour with Windows 10, but I'm guessing that an app that replaces parts of windows' shell is not exactly using public Windows API to do so. It's often using hacks and workarounds instead. There's no backward compatibility here because there wasn't any compatibility to begin with. The same thing is happening on MacOS when applications use undocumented private APIs and for some reason Apple decides to take them away.

Unless the updates really uninstalled the application instead of just breaking it, and that's really (another) bad decision from Microsoft.

'Just breaking it' in the case of these shell enhancers would result in the user having no user interface whatsoever after the upgrade.

Windows' upgrade process could in theory disable the shell extension, but that would be even worse than uninstalling the program given how programs on Windows do not take kindly to being 'half-installed' (case in point: uninstallers that break when some application files are removed).

This is what backwards compatibility leads to, and there is no way all parties can win in this scenario.

I didn't think about this, uninstalling it is better in that case. However based on coderjames' comment, I guess it wasn't completely uninstalled, and, as you said, left him without a usable system. I agree, backwards compatiblity is a double edged sword.

I presumed from the context of the comment that 'usable' was rather loaded language used to denigrate the built-in Start menu in Windows 10. The interpretation works both ways, however.

I meant that I literally did not have a visible Start Menu that I could interact with because Windows 10 uninstalled the version of Classic Shell[1] I was using as part of installing the Anniversary Edition upgrade. I actually had that message pop up, "Windows has uninstalled this program because it is known to be incompatible." Luckily there was an Anniversary Edition-compatible version available that I could reinstall.

Note also that I don't especially consider Classic Shell to be an odd program given that when I briefly worked at Microsoft a few years ago (Win 8.1 was current), my manager actually recommended I install it on my second day there on the company-provided computer in order to retain the classic UI because that group found the Win8 touch UI to be unusable on the desktop.

[1] http://www.classicshell.net

Reply on news.ycombinator.com