Rants

Posted on 2 Jul 2009 at 16:28

 

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Sometimes I want to take Microsoft, the whole massive company, and give it the mother of all spanks on its multi-billion dollar behind.

It's astounding how this incredibly successful organisation can get some things so right and other things so spectacularly wrong. It's almost as if it's trying to rile its users, and me specifically.

Windows 7 will be out soon. In fact, it will be released earlier than Microsoft had planned, which is something of a surprise. There will be some new features and enhancements, but let's forget about those for now. The great thing about Windows 7, which will be with us in October, is that it will be quicker and more stable than Vista. We've been playing with a version that's close to the final code, and it's lovely.

No doubt a vast amount of effort has gone into tuning this operating system into a great product that will doubtless be adopted by the majority of computer users over the coming few years. And yet, with its enormous corporate brain throbbing with almost obscene intelligence, Microsoft has made a cheap and idiotic mistake. I don't know if I can even bring myself to report it.

The version of Explorer included in Windows 7 will hide file extensions by default.

There, I've said it. I can hear thousands of Shopper readers exploding violently with rage, spitting and writhing as their very souls revolt at this travesty of user experience. Yes, you're right, this is the same behaviour as that exhibited by Explorer in earlier versions of Windows, which was frequently abused by virus-writers to trick unsuspecting victims into running programs.

This means that Explorer displays a file called 'image.jpg', for example, as 'image'. Thus users are not confronted by strange-looking filenames, because presumably seeing an ugly .jpg suffix is going to scare them. However, the problem is that inexperienced users don't know what's going on and the bad guys are wise to this, which is why they do things such as renaming malicious files with a false extension.

For example, rename 'file.exe' as 'file.jpg.exe' and it will appear in Explorer as 'file.jpg', which looks pretty innocent. Double-clicking this file will not open an image editor or viewer, however: it will run a program, which is going to be a bad thing. In this respect Windows will help criminals disguise their Trojans.

Microsoft should balance the convenience of hiding file extensions with the danger that accompanies this as a default setting that only experts will change. Everyone I know who works with PCs changes this setting to show file extensions, which goes some way to proving (in my unscientific survey with a sample size of about a dozen) that the default choice is daft.

I'm not even sure that hiding file extensions is any more convenient. It just makes the screen look a little less cluttered. There's still time for the company to change the default setting - Windows 7 is a few weeks away from a final release - but I know, in my industry-blackened cynical heart, that it won't.

Regardless of which version of Windows you use, it's a sensible idea to change Explorer's default settings so that you can see all file extensions. In Windows XP you can do this by running Explorer, choosing Tools from the menu and clicking on Folder Options. Click the View tab and untick the option 'Hide extensions for known file types'.

If Windows 7 still has the wrong default settings when it's released I'll post instructions on how to change them on a new website that I'll create called www.turn-off-stupid-microsoft-default-settings.com. Unbelievably, that domain name is still available. I hope no-one registers it before me.

Author: Simon Edwards