“One of the big concerns of anyone considering moving to Windows Vista is ‘How many of my applications will work on Windows Vista?’ We have spent a lot of time trying to answer that very question for our company so I will share with you some of the common problem areas we found for applications to help give you an idea of what applications might have problems for you.”
As with any major release of Windows, the same rules will probably apply: Most “standard” applications will work, most “system” applications will not. This means anything that hooks into the kernel or system DLLs to do awesome low-level things, like non-disruptive partitioning, debuggers, etc.
As with any major release of Windows, the same rules will probably apply: Most “standard” applications will work, most “system” applications will not.
Sorry, but couldn’t resist! So DOS apps were “system” apps:) They mostly don’t work after ME anymore. But XP fixed that they’re almost 100% not supported.
Yeah, I know legacy is legacy, and everything should die once in a while for the sake of progress (I even agree with that). But “system” wording was just to tempting not to bite.
DOS apps aren’t Windows apps. That there were supported for so long (except for those which used “unreal mode”) is a testament to Microsoft’s commitment to backwards compatibility.
“DOS apps aren’t Windows apps. That there were supported for so long (except for those which used “unreal mode”) is a testament to Microsoft’s commitment to backwards compatibility.”
I can’t quite agree with that. I’d be more inclined to say it’s a testament to the staying power of DOS at the core of Microsoft’s efforts. Though ‘real mode DOS’ was blocked in Win ME it wasn’t gone yet (there were hacks to get it back). So XP, released in 2001, was actually the first Windows marketed as a consumer desktop not running on what was essentially a DOS core. I’m not sure what the situation was in the NT line, but for the consumer releases, 95, 98 and ME supporting DOS apps didn’t require any effort, not supporting them would have. With XP, which is part of the NT lineage, DOS support has (to the best of my knowledge) gone down. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, but under the circumstances you can hardly point to 95, 98 and ME as evidence of a commitment to backwards compatibility.
Edited 2006-01-09 10:02
It will boil down to how well the app was written to begin with, but even the best app can’t forsee the changes of the future.
In one hand you get visicalc, an insanely old app that runs without flaw on XP, and something simple like Nero (before the update) which wouldn’t work on XP.
“It will boil down to how well the app was written to begin with”
Actually it boils down to what libraries and system dependencies the program has, and whether or not the APIs it uses have changed in any relevent way. If a program doesn’t work with Vista because the APIs and/or libraries it depends on have changed, saying the application was poorly written would be like saying it’s poorly written because it’s a Windows EXE and doesn’t run under Linux (counting out the use of wine and other possible emulators of course).
I’m pretty sure a large number of applications will work perfectly, but it’s certain a number of them won’t. Compatibility modes may help, they did with some problems I know of in XP, but it’s clear some software will need new versions to work.
The paranoid part of my brain played up for a moment when they mentioned firewalls, antivirus and (later int he article) Winzip (though only for x64). This all seems to be functionality that has been intigrated into Windows, or will be in future. But thinking rationally, whithout the paranoia, I don’t think they’d go this far just to sabotage external apps that do the same work.
I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what the situation will be when Vista is released. Though since I now use Linux 99% of the time it probably won’t be much of an issue for me either way. Until people start asking me how to get things to work again anyway.
Edited 2006-01-08 22:31
I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what the situation will be when Vista is released. Though since I now use Linux 99% of the time it probably won’t be much of an issue for me either way. Until people start asking me how to get things to work again anyway.
According to a recent Gartnerreport it will take over two years after Vista is released before the the corporate market share exeeds 10%.
So I guess that this will not be a problem for most windows users either. By the time most companies ugrade to Vista, most applications will have been updated, once or even twice and Vista compatiblity will most likely be included in such updates.
“According to a recent Gartnerreport it will take over two years after Vista is released before the the corporate market share exeeds 10%.”
If that’s accurate MS will also make their money off Vista gradually and over an extended period of time, I wonder what that could mean (if anything) for following versions of Windows.
As a matter of personal preference I much preffer only having new OS versions released every few years, I think that I’d rather four years over five though. It means two things for me, the first is that I won’t have to go through the hassle of updating as frequently, and the second is that there will hopefully be more and better features in each release than with the old two year release cycle.
“According to a recent Gartnerreport it will take over two years after Vista is released before the the corporate market share exeeds 10%.”
This is a prime example of what happens when you are competing with nobody except yourself. The same can be said about MS Office.
Some of them won’t work on *purpose* so you can buy their “Optimized for Vista!11!” version. Smart thinking, no doubt.
Some companies already did that with XP, although if there’s enough customer demand they’ll provide a free patch or some other fix.
I’m not really sure why this is such a big deal? Its a brand new OS shipped something like 6-7 years after the last release.
Mac OS X apps have to be updated for each point release every year or so.
GCC libraries change SO much that Linux applications basically have to be custom built for every distro and every release.
Windows has had nearly perfect backwards compatiblity since the days of Windows 3.0, so give them a break!
How often do GCC libraries change? And what does that matter. If an app is compiled against a version of a library, it was always need that library, or one with the same call structure at least no matter what.
I don’t know of too many applications that need to be “custom built” for every distro. Sure, the programs need to know where the necessary libraries are located (and this varies from distro to distro) but that’s where the beauty (and ugliness) of configure come in.
Also, there were a lot of older apps that didn’t run correctly on Windows, even though it is supposed to work. Windows, for some odd reason, supports legacy applications directly rather than implementing some sort of emulator.
Why do they bother to continue to support old DOS applications when they run much faster and cleaner on a DOS emulator?
“GCC libraries change SO much that Linux applications basically have to be custom built for every distro and every release.”
Even if this were true, it doesn’t matter for Linux/FOSS. Just update your application from repositories (or re-compile them yourself) for free.
For Windows, application breakage between successive versions of the OS normally means a lot of additional expense to upgrade applications.
I’m not really sure why this is such a big deal? Its a brand new OS shipped something like 6-7 years after the last release
Because people bought or got apps and they want them to still work if they have to change OS version.
As you want to talk Linux, some apps predates Linux and still work on it (that’s 15+ years).
GCC libraries change SO much that Linux applications basically have to be custom built for every distro and every release
Don’t talk about what you don’t understand please. The change you’re talking about, that forced to rebuild everything, is 9 years old !!! So you call 9 years old “change SO much”, are you stupid ?
Nothing has to be custom build like you imply, this is just BS. As long as you are on the same arch, or you compile for the generic one (i386, ppc, …) , you can put your app on every distro you want.
FYI, that’s how some Linux games are distributed.
That also means I can put my binaries on a distro of the same or superiror arch (or vice versa) and it will work without problem.
Windows has had nearly perfect backwards compatiblity since the days of Windows 3.0, so give them a break!
This is BS, I have piles of games that don’t work anymore, there are piles of enterprise apps that don’t work correctly or at all on Win2000 and Win2003, so much that you have versions tailored for NT4, Win2000, Win2003. That’s not what I call “nearly perfect”.
Don’t talk about what you don’t understand please. The change you’re talking about, that forced to rebuild everything, is 9 years old !!! So you call 9 years old “change SO much”, are you stupid ?
Nothing has to be custom build like you imply, this is just BS. As long as you are on the same arch, or you compile for the generic one (i386, ppc, …) , you can put your app on every distro you want.
FYI, that’s how some Linux games are distributed.
That also means I can put my binaries on a distro of the same or superiror arch (or vice versa) and it will work without problem.
As long as your binaries are statically linked. It gets very ugly with dynamic linking.
The interfaces for gcc and glibc keep changing. It’s not wrong or bad, it’s just the way it is. Since they are mostly used with open-source projects, it’s not a big issue for these users.
As for what you call BS, well… I doubt you could install Debian potato packages on etch. It can work, but it doesn’t always work. Likewise, there is a reason why there are packages for RH8, RH9, FC2 or SuSE 9, SuSE 9.1, etc. Personally, I have a Gentoo server and I have to do a dependency checkup after installing a new glibc. That checkup is recompiling a few packages that no longer work… and I am not using ricey flags. Last, but not the least: I have old programs (1997) that I cannot compile with newer GCC versions. It isn’t a real issue to me, but backward compatibility is often set aside for better implementations.
In a nutshell, the parent poster exagerrated a bit, but I would not discredit it completely.
I have full faith on Microsoft on this one that most of the applications will work fine. Microsoft as a company has always provided excellent backward compatibility and its almost unbelievable, how they are able to improve the OS and still keeps app compat.
Device drivers on the other hand, may break or may need to be at least re-compiled. Since in Vista there are a lot of changes in the Kernel as well, so i can understand why this will be required. No one would want to emulate behavior of previous OS in order for drivers to work because performance matters a lot in kernel mode. For app, a slight overhead of emulation is ok.
Forget backwards compatibility. Windows will never get over its design flaws, or get rid of those nasty viruses and malware if it keeps backwards compatibility. Making a new system entirely (such as OS 9->OS X) allows to fix some horrible problems and then after companies release software for it, makes a better economy because people have to upgrade.
Now in Windows’ case I’m not completely positive they could pull it off and keep their customers at the same time but it really needs to be done.
I always wonder about this whenever a new OS version comes out. If compatiblity is an issue, then just hold off upgrading to Vista until the apps you need have been updated for the new OS.
It worked for Mac. People could use OS9 compatibility mode until enough OS X apps came out that justified upgrading. But even with the compatibility mode, I believe most people just kept their old computers until the OS X “critical mass” occurred.
Plus, upgrading immediately is always a bad thing. Look at the issues Xbox 360 had. Just wait for 6 months or a year for the bug patches to come out then upgrade.