The Electron maintainers should've considered that possibility before reaching for a private API. It's on the Electron's team's shoulders and nobody else's.

If I were building a FOSS platform, I wouldn't give a second thought to third parties making use of my platform's private APIs. They're private for a reason, whether that be because they're not yet fully baked or because using them can have unintended consequences, they're not intended for public consumption. I especially wouldn't want somebody else's platform to depend on my private APIs, because I am then effectively locked into keeping that API frozen in time by the numerous others building on this other person's platform.

It's generally poor practice to build upon such brittle things as under-the-hood tinkering anyway.

> Apple's position is technically noble, but that doesn't help their users.

The alternative doesn’t help either. That’s the approach Microsoft has taken and look what a mess Windows is because of it.

Sounds like Joe will direct his anger towards Slack and Spotify, and as a paying customer he has every right to be upset when his software doesn't work.

It’s true that they’ve made some progress but my work laptop running Windows 11 still has UI elements from Windows 95/NT 4. The file system hasn’t improved since then and the keyboard responsiveness is actually worse. BeOS on 90s hardware absolutely torches Windows 11 on things like UI responsiveness, ability to multitask without degrading UI performance, and the file system (not networking, of course, it wasn’t perfect).

I think it’s fair to question whether the decisions around backwards compatibility have been worth the cost but I’d imagine they’re already doing that. Enterprise IT departments love Windows but nobody else does, and the generation of people who grew up using iOS/Android and macOS/ChromeOS for school aren’t going to jump at the chance to bring that enterprise IT experience into their personal lives.

You can still find applications written for Windows 3.1 in the latest builds of Windows 11. Something regarding database drivers if I recall correctly.

Now imagine if you could get rid of all that legacy crap to make it work in the first place. Microsoft CAN’T do that, because the entire premise of Windows is backwards compatability.

Apple? They don’t care. Killing 32bit apps? Just make an announcement saying that in 2 major macOS releases, macOS won’t be able to run 32 bit apps. It cuts down bloat, and it cuts down on the potential attack surfaces for malicious actors.

Obviously just about everyone would agree that Windows 1 -> 7 was progress. I don’t think you’ll find too many people who’ll say the same about Windows 7 -> 11.

As a dev, if you use a private method, you've just taken ownership of the problem. I suggested to you in our contract not to do it, and that it would likely not be supported, and you did it anyway. Fix your shit, common software or not.