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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

It's also unchecked in Windows by default - I suspect that in reality the concept of extensions probably confuses some users, who end up changing the extension and then struggle to work out how to open their saved files.

( I always prefer to see the extensions too though :) )

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Windows gives you a big warning when you change the extension, which seems to me both sufficient and better than hiding the extension altogether (which, like URL hiding, is a fairly dangerous and largely unnecessary convenience)

I've learned to never underestimate users' ability to shoot themselves in the foot. People will click through any popup dialogue which might suggest that their decision to perform an action was wrong.

because most of them are clearly fearmongering by ms, apple et al, scaring you into staying subscribed to their particular product. If they abuse their own warning systems, why should we respect them?

It works exactly the same way in macOS Finder as in Windows Explorer. Extensions are hidden by default. You can enable to show extensions (either by individual file, or globally). If a file has it's extension shown, you will get a confirmation prompt warning you of the consequences by changing the file extension.

Users are well-trained to ignore warnings.

Like browsers, file navigation UIs could also just grey out the file extension.

The warning is a massive inconvenience. It reverts the file name if you cancel, so if you spent any effort on the new name, it will be wasted. Moreover, people often expect to change the file type by changing the name, and they get confused when it doesn't work (or it works for them in some case and they expect it will work here too). Lastly, users often don't read error messages, let alone understand them ("file extension" is hardly an easy concept...), so it's not necessarily helpful to them. Really, the number of cases where you'd need to change a file extension are so small compared to when you don't that I completely understand why they made this choice. It's imperfect, but I don't know of a better solution.

Isn't it also confusing for the average user when they end up with identical looking files? I didn't realize that macOS had per-file extension hiding until I synced some images over from my iPad. I ended up with files that I couldn't tell apart at a glance because they had the same name but were different image file types. I'm now torn if I actually want to force all extensions to show because I think showing applications as "Foo.app" is ugly (I know, it's a stupid reason to dislike the option...)

Nothing stops you from putting the same label on multiple boxes in real life.

This is an outdated mindset. Literally everyone knows the difference between .docx and .jpg in 2021.

You're living in a beautiful bubble.

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