Hacker News Reader

Comment by hard_times | Hacker News Reader

> Windows 8 build 7861's PDF Reader

Was not aware there ever was a Win32 desktop PDF reader shipped by Microsoft.

Ah, if there’s one thing you should run very outdated versions of, it’s a PDF reader. Can I get a TIFF reader last updated in 2010 to go along with it?

simply do not open files with malware in them

Same. I only ever saw, and still do, PDFs by default opening in Edge.

I looked into it and I'm even more confused.

https://github.com/i486girl/win7-sp2/blob/1c57943c2e4f5e27e7...

This appears to suggest the appx file will somehow just run on Windows 7 which can't be right.

>This appears to suggest the appx file will somehow just run on Windows 7 which can't be right.

They extracted the .exe from the appx.

But surely that relies on a bunch of “UWP” and Windows 8 APIs? The screenshots I managed to find make it look very much like it relies on the Metro UWP garbage.

Windows 8 shipped with build 8400 (apparently), so I assume this PDF reader is pre-UWP rewrite from one of the early Windows “8” builds, that were mostly Windows 7.

As far as I could tell/recall the Windows 8 Reader app was always a thin wrapper around Edge (Spartan) (which is also when it broke, when Edge switched to Chromium). I suppose it is possible it worked with Trident (IE11), too, or the "Service Pack" includes some version of Edge (Spartan), which would have been all the hard work on that, though that isn't listed.

7861 was a fairly early build of Windows 8, compiled in 2010 [1]. In the sreenshots it looks more like Windows 7 than Windows 8, so maybe it predated the full Metro implementation?

[1]: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_8_build_7861

Reply on news.ycombinator.com