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Comment by IFC_LLC | Hacker News Reader

I remember the times when Microsoft had a lot of problems 20 years ago because of Sasser and other viruses that were taking over Windows. They did not have any contenders. Yet they have stopped any software development for 9 months just to re-work their entire codebase to prevent things like direct memory execution and stuff like that. The result of that was Windows XP Service Pack 2. After that thing windows XP became a legend.

Now, when Linux is slowly creeping on one side, and Mac NEO on another they keep releasing this AI-slop.

By the looks of it they make most of their money from the cloud and other software things nowadays. And Windows has become a sidekick in their processes.

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I don't think SP2 made much of a difference in the popularity of XP. It was already dominant, and it's mostly remembered as "legendary" because it had become the target platform for every hardware and software vendor on the planet. Windows 98 was too flaky to engender any serious friction to upgrades, and Windows 2000 was not consumer-friendly enough; XP effectively unified the consumer and professional desktop markets, and became the gold standard.

SP2, if anything, slowed down adoption, since it threw a bunch of spanners in the way of third-party code. It was probably necessary, just to stem the flow of bad press, but no mean a key in XP's overall success.

It was not that bad. I remember when SP fixed a bunch of issues with bluetooth, and windows CD burning program was better than any of the Nero Burning ROMs, cause those became unusable overbloated.

Also, technically XP was Windows NT 5.1, so it was built on a solid basis.

Whereas 98 was still in the kinda DOS-based 9x line.

And I fully agree with you to not mention Windows Me.

Windows Me was some weird marketing attempt at squeezing more life out of the dead-end '9x line. I honestly don't know who, in their sane mind, would ever pay for such a thing.

> I don't think SP2 made much of a difference in the popularity of XP

The general knowledge was to wait until the SP were stable. This was hard. 4.0 had SP6, 2k had SP4.

I guess it depends on the industry, but most people would happily run anything that had undergone a single round of patching. And plenty were so obsessed with the latest and greatest that they would jump at .0 releases without a care in the world - which is how Vista got its reputation, for example (the .0 was pretty bad, and by the time both builds and ecosystems had improved, people had decided to stay away).

> I don't think SP2 made much of a difference in the popularity of XP

SP1 was buggy as hell.

> Windows XP Service Pack 2. After that thing windows XP became a legend.

God that was an era. XP SP2 was a great OS, IE was the best browser, MSN was the most popular messenger, Skype was acquired, HTC's Windows CE devices were shipping real web browsers that worked over 3G.

By the end of the Ballmer era, Microsoft has lost the OS, the browser, the messenger, the meeting service and mobile.

I agree with you on everything except the browser. I'm pretty sure I was using Firefox (or maybe Opera?) on Windows before the release of Vista. I know I was still using IE for some ActiveX web apps for a while. This was the era that I switched over to Linux full-time, but both Windows 2000 and XP were great OSes at this time. Linux was painful to adopt, but I really loved the promise of "full-control" over my computer.

My peeve today is how bad modern chat programs feel compared to the old instant messengers. The modern programs all feel slow and clunky in comparison. I felt that all of the messengers I used (MSN, AIM, ICQ) were more responsive than their modern day equivalents.

Boy oh boy, have we forgotten the Maxthon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon

I remember the times when IE passed ACID test? Do we remember the ACID? http://acid2.acidtests.org/#top

Ah, what the times were those. Firefox was just gaining traction.

And I agree. Slack is sitting there, consuming over gig of memory on my computer, and Miranda NG was able to do the same functionality with cool skins and just 30 megs of ram.

Skins... Skins... We've lost even those...

> Boy oh boy, have we forgotten the Maxthon?

Never heard about it (Europe).

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

Yes, I've just checked, even in 2009 you still have IE over 64% of browser usage.

They said IE was the best browser, not the most popular. I wouldn't dispute that IE was more commonly used at the time.

Just checked your link and this fits with what I thought in terms of marketshare. You can see that Firefox was ~25% of marketshare in 2009. Which is an enormous share of the pie when you consider that they couldn't stick a download link on the front page of the most dominant search engine, and it didn't come preinstalled.

Never used Maxthon.

Damn, this also reminded me that RSS feeds were everywhere back then, and the browser supported it directly.

Oh don't tell me about Nero, Winamp, eMule, Download managers, auto-dialers, free internet on Saturdays after 2am till 9am, miranda NG, PHPBB, etc.

The internet was awesome.

> They said IE was the best browser, not the most popular.

TBF I should have said 'most popular' for all those categories.

There were several points in time (after the SP2 too) when installing WinXP with an active internet connection was nearly impossible, because it would get infected during the installation and shut itself down halfway through it.

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