Amid strong criticism from users, Microsoft has acknowledged and fixed various problems that frequently occur in Windows 11, while continuing to claim that it is improving system performance. Recently, Microsoft just admitted that an update it released broke a key feature of the Windows 11 Start menu, causing the Start menu to not work properly for some users. This problem obviously lies with Microsoft itself.But at the same time, Microsoft senior engineer Raymond Chen recently attributed many Windows experience problems to user errors in another article, believing that many seemingly system "rollovers" are actually often caused by improper user operations or irregular behavior of third-party software.
In his latest blog post, Chen reviewed the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, especially the huge conflict in compatibility between the two generations of systems, trying to explain that today's Windows 11 compatibility dilemma is far from the worst period in the history of Microsoft desktop systems. He revealed that a considerable number of programs written for Windows 3.1 were almost "tied" to the internal implementation of the old system and could not be successfully migrated to Windows 95. The root of the problem is that some developers do not strictly use the documented official API, but choose to forcibly convert system handles into pointers and directly access the operating system's internal data structures. This "shortcut" can still run under the 16-bit heap management adopted by Windows 3.1, but after Windows 95 introduced a 32-bit heap suitable for user interface and graphics objects, this approach completely failed.
Because of this, at least in terms of compatibility, today's Windows 11 users are not as "miserable" as they imagined: In addition to a series of stringent hardware thresholds set by Microsoft itself, most users have not encountered the large-scale, structural compatibility disaster that year. For users who are not familiar with the history, Windows 95 is a huge visual leap compared to Windows 3.1. It introduces a more complete graphical user interface and requires more hardware resource support. Therefore, the overall architecture must be upgraded to a 32-bit design, which also further amplifies the gap between the old software and the new system at the technical level.
Chen pointed out that Microsoft had tried to make the transition as smooth as possible through "patching": the system had a built-in mechanism to help old applications run on the new platform, and used various "compatibility quirks" processing logic to adapt to old programs written in different ways. However, some cases are almost unsolvable - for example, there is a program that does a very strict system version check: if the detection result is not Windows 3.0, 3.1 or 2.1, it directly determines that it must be Windows 2.0, and rejects Windows 95 from a logical design. Such a program is destined to be architecturally impossible to be compatible with new systems. In addition, many applications crashed or failed under Windows 95 because they bypassed the official API and directly interacted with the system internals in an unsupported way. This behavior is almost bound to cause problems in the new architecture.
From an engineering perspective, these crashes and data corruption are not entirely Microsoft's fault, but as far as ordinary users are concerned, "not easy to use" means not easy to use, and the attribution of responsibility will not change the bad experience itself. Many users today regard Windows 11 as the "worst Windows in history." This may be largely due to the nostalgia filter of past versions, ignoring the compatibility disasters that frequently caused system chaos or even failure to start. As one Neowin reader leonsk29 reminded in the comments, people tend to only remember the good aspects of the old system, but forget the years of worrying about various compatibility issues.