alt Hacker NewsIsn't it just great how a decision made by some genius in Microsoft decades ago caused so much confusion and mess. Even on Windows 11 the default is to hide extensions, because, geez, wouldn't want to confuse people with change after decades of it being like that.
Although, was the hiding something that the Mac introduced?
The idea of the last part of the filename (after the period) determining what program is launched to handle the file is odd anyway...
I wonder if the Windows spyware infrastructure measures what % of people turn off extension hiding..
Replies
throwawaysoxjje • today at 4:10 PM
Macs originally didn’t have filename extensions because the file type was stored as metadata in the file system
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The mac started out without using extensions at all, the type was embedded in the metadata. That's still possible now, but it's largely derived from extensions first. I believe Finder shows all extensions by default. It certainly does in details mode.