Never understood why Windows’ explorer hides extension by default. Does MS fear it would confuse their users?
Yes, they think their users will be confused by and accidentally remove extensions. To be fair that might happen sometimes but it’s nowhere near worth it
They already have a confirmation box when you try to change the extension. And could just as easily move it into another column where it’s harder to change (explorer was like this once, a long time ago).
And yet, they keep hiding the on the rationale that it confuses the users. The most common thing on explorer is some user being confused because they can’t understand what clicking on a file is supposed to do, but that’s not an argument for showing them…
So, yeah, that’s the surface-level explanation. But there’s a deeper reason.
You seriously underestimate the stupidity of 80% of windows users. They could put multiple warnings and people would still click past them without reading then bitch to their IT team when they break something.
They already have a confirmation box when you try to change the extension
I think you overestimate the average users willingness to read anything. Only thing they know is how to bitch about things not working even when they were told exactly why it’s not working/what they did (wrong)
Ah, right, in the context that Windows determines filetype only on extension.
Btw, there’s a bunch of mimeopen implementations for Linux. Is there something like that for Windows too?
I don’t think it even fucks the file, windows just can’t open it until you put the file extension back.
I somewhat agree. Although I wouldn’t say getting easier was the wrong move overall. Without guis I never would gotten into programming. If I’d never gotten into programming I would have never wanted to use command lines. So the right choices around making things easier, I think are great. But yeah if people are too uneducated to undo a file rename, that’s probably a sign of a bad type of coddling.
worry about users not being able to open files after renaming them since you can also edit those extensions via text, and people aren’t taught about file association.
What do you mean? linkin_park_-_numb.mp3 clearly has an extension, it’s all the other files that don’t!
One time I struggled debugging a program on a clean Windows machine. For some reason it seemed like it couldn’t find a JSON file that’s obviously in the system. I could even open the file on my own and view its contents.
Turns out after much frustration that the file was actually a json.txt file. I didn’t notice because the extension was hidden, so I only saw .json and thought it was fine.
sounds like vscode.
helix or micro on windows to get away from that garbage.
The OS designed to prime the population into bad cyber security practices so they are more easily able to exploit and scam later on.
takes off tinfoil hat
You have a point though. Why hide file types by default unless you believe the users are too dumb to ever learn what a few letters mean.
If they’re that dumb leave the extensions on and let their eyes glaze over it like they would anyway. Hiding the extensions doesn’t seem beneficial in any way.
You can’t imagine how much I hate this setting. A couple of weeks ago I helped a guy install some specific software on a windows machine provided by the customer. It’s like one exe with a config file. Pretty basic. My instructions were:
- Copy the exe to a specific path
- Create a new text file in the same path and copy paste this provided text into the file
- Rename file to abc.xml
The exe was throwing errors because of the missing config file. Of course the filename was abc.xml.txt 💩
This is part of what helped the I love you virus to spread. Not too many idiots would open a file titled ILoveYou.txt.vbs, but even some smarter people will turn their brains off if they get a file titled ILoveYou.txt, possibly even me, except the first thing I do with a new computer is unhide file extensions.
