my point wasnt that anyone should upgrade or not. The actual point was why limit things to cater to those users only. One could also argue upgrading can be cheap with hardware these days but that theory is flawed as well. Im only saying that the options related to a lesser OS should also include the ones from the newer. As it stands many many things either havent been added or was severly delayed due to the old 16 bit version. Thats finally gone but weve yet to see any leaps and bounds in the area of dependant software.
mIRC already does this for example trasparent windows wasnt added until win2k. So 95 users cant have it but 2k+ users can. It doesnt mean mIRC is any less better (is that a phrase) on older os's it just offers more to support some features from the new one. I would like to see more of this such as common controls (introduced in 95b) and so on.
As for the icons you can have the best of both worlds no matter wich os you use.
My earlier statement still stands however alot of developers (myself included) have to avoid alot of newer technology to ensure the most compatibility. Upgrading from 95 to 98 either wont be that large a hit or if it is then perhaps a new (or upgraded) pc is in order otherwise they simply cant use the features a particular application may offer.
as for the "dark ages" if were still worried about writing software basically for win95 in 10 years just how old does it have to be before we consider it time to move forward? My issue isnt with wich OS one prefers or what reasons one may or may not have for upgrading but in limiting the software we chose to write years and years later. Personally ive used every windows version written and believe it or not i do see a point to staying with certain builds. not a 9x one because they are horibly unstable. Ive never seen a report of a 2 month uptime on a 9x build. This may not be important to some but it does show a limitation. All software written for any os is only as good as the OS it was written for and suffers from the same limitations. Of course you still have to consider the older versions but not just those alone. one should also consider the newer versions as well. Also visual styles etc.. is only one aspect I wasnt just refering to that alone.
As for the xp vs. 2k. xp is 2k+luna. you can disable luna entirely with 3 mouse clicks. the stability is about the same and xp offers more hardware support than 2k did.
