Introduction
On the one hand, it’s truly impressive that Windows is backwards compatible with software that stretches back decades. In theory, you could run some apps meant for Windows 95 on Windows 11. But, backward compatibility isn’t free, and it’s debatable whether enough Windows users need this level of backward compatibility to justify the downsides.
Windows still carries decades of technical baggage
A necessary evil?
It’s actually rather remarkable that Windows offers as much compatibility as it does. Don’t forget that modern Windows is based on the Windows NT kernel, not Windows 9.x. So while it makes sense that you can still run Windows XP software, allowing Windows 95 and Windows 98 apps to work requires deliberate engineering.
Microsoft didn’t do this out of altruism either. The fact that you can still play some old Windows games on Windows 11 is just a happy byproduct of business needs. Every time Windows shifted to a substantially different platform, there would be hordes of business customers who weren’t ready with new software. Indeed, many industrial systems or other key devices still run on Windows XP, for example. What I’m saying is that backwards compatibility isn’t really a choice Microsoft would have made if there wasn’t this technical debt from its customers. Being the most widely-used desktop operating system and being so intertwined with the business world means your code isn’t yours to do with as you please. It’s hard to imagine Microsoft doing what Apple did and simply dropping all support for 32-bit software from macOS. If you had 32-bit software, you either had to hope the developer updated its apps, or stick with the last 32-bit compatible macOS version indefinitely.
Brand
Apple
Operating System
macOS
The MacBook Neo with the A18 Pro chip is Apple’s most affordable laptop yet, with all-day battery life and buttery-smooth performance in a thin and light profile.
Supporting old software makes Windows more complex
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch
Every concession to backwards compatibility comes with some small sacrifice, and these can add up to a degraded experience overall. Windows 11 is littered with these little legacy clues. It’s fair to ask, “Why do we still have a control panel in Windows?” It’s a prime example of this issue. Instead of either sticking with the classic Control Panel or switching cleanly to a slick new Settings app, Windows has been stuck in this weird limbo for years now. Some old software needs the Control Panel to be there and work in a specific way, and so we have some things that are only in Settings, some that are only in Control Panel, and some that are duplicated across both.
There are better ways to be backward compatible
The options are endless
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek
The ironic part of this whole discussion is that whenever I want to run legacy software on my Windows 11 computer, I never actually use any of Windows’ built-in compatibility options. If a program is old enough to need them, there are other superior options. For old video games, I use DOS emulation. DOSBox, PCem, and a lot more are there for the taking and do an excellent job of, as far as I can tell, perfectly emulating DOS on modern PCs. Likewise, if I need to run Windows XP software, I’ll just use a virtual machine. If that software needs to access the internet, transfer data, or access USB storage, that all works perfectly with modern virtual machine software.
Legacy support slows down major platform improvements and hurts security
Pulling the band-aid slowly is worse
Microsoft is stuck in a spot where it has to keep hardware and software support for obsolete technologies running in parallel with new ones. Of course, it’s not just Windows that does this. It was only in 2025 that macOS finally dropped support for FireWire for real. The difference is that, thanks to its vertical hardware and software integration, Apple can make hard decisions about its OS. Also, Apple’s professional customers look very different. If people were using Macs to run old CNC machines or production lines, it would have the same constraints.
There are security concerns as well. The more old code and features you leave in your OS, the more potential vulnerabilities it can have. The bigger your codebase gets, and the less attention old or little-used components justify, the bigger the potential for exploitation.
Windows may eventually need its own clean break
I’ve written before that what we really need is an OS written from scratch because of how much hardware has changed, and all the additional layers of abstraction that waste processing power and complicate things for software developers. Oddly enough, it might turn out that NVIDIA’s RTX Spark could be a step in that direction. Like modern macOS, Windows had to be recompiled for Arm when running on Spark and other Arm-based systems. This means that all x86 legacy software has to run through a compatibility layer anyway, similar to Rosetta II on Mac. That means the core OS doesn’t have to be weighed down, and backward compatibility is handled by a separate, optional tool. As I mentioned earlier, emulation, virtualization, and compatibility layers have been the best way to run legacy software for years now, anyway. So, Windows honestly doesn’t need that functionality clogging up its central arteries.
Conclusion
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