Support for SNI is available since Firefox 2, Opera 8, Safari 2. 1, Google Chrome 6, and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista.

Windows Vista was released on 8 November 2006 to business customers, consumer versions following on 30 January 2007.

Screenshot of the new Windows 8 Start Screen

Windows 8 is the upcoming version of Microsoft Windows.

Windows RT, a special version of Windows 8, runs on system-on-a-chip devices with mobile ARM processors.

Windows 8 features a redesigned user interface, designed to make it easier for touchscreen users to use Windows.

On the Building Windows 8 blog, it was announced that a computer running Windows 8 can boot up much faster than Windows 7.

* Windows 8

* Windows 8 Pro

* Windows 8 Enterprise

Windows 8 Release Preview and Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate were both released on May 31, 2012.

Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012.

Microsoft has said that Windows Server 2012 was available on 4 September 2012 and Windows 8 will be available on October 26, 2012.

As a 16 bit application, the program will not run natively under 64 bit versions of the Windows operating system.

Microsoft announced that they have discontinued the separate release of WinFS for Windows XP and Windows Vista and will gradually incorporate the technologies developed for WinFS in other products and technologies, notably Microsoft SQL Server.

The aim of WinFLP is to give companies a viable upgrade option for older PCs that are running Windows 95, 98, and Me that will be supported with patches and updates for the next several years.

The desktop interface is also present for running windowed applications, although Windows RT will not run any desktop applications not included in the system.

Empirical data suggest that Windows ( using the Windows sleep timer which accepts millisecond sleep times ) will schedule on a 1024 Hz clock and will delay 24 of 1024 transitions per second to make an average of 1000 Hz for the update rate.

* Known on the Windows platform as " DLL Hell ", an incompatible updated DLL will break executables that depended on the behavior of the previous DLL.

About 125 Qt developers will be transferred to Digia, with the immediate goal of bringing Qt support to Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms.

However, the scripting engine will continue to be shipped with future releases of Microsoft Windows and IIS.

An in-kernel web server ( like TUX on GNU / Linux or Microsoft IIS on Windows ) will usually work faster, because, as part of the system, it can directly use all the hardware resources it needs, such as non-paged memory, CPU time-slices, network adapters, or buffers.

Because FCB compatibility has not been maintained, WordStar 3. x will not function properly on modern versions of Windows.

Photos can be edited with the Palm Photos PC software ( Windows only ), and when the photos are transferred to the handheld they will contain all changes made to the photo.

One typical difference between package management in proprietary operating systems, such as Mac OS X and Windows, and those in free and open source software, such as Linux, is that free and open source software systems permit third-party packages to also be installed and upgraded through the same mechanism, whereas the package management systems of Mac OS X and Windows will only upgrade software provided by Apple and Microsoft, respectively ( with the exception of some third party drivers in Windows ).

In versions before Windows Vista, if the user pushes the combination of Ctrl + Shift + F10 at any time during the game, the user will be presented with a tool used by the developers during testing.

While it did not ship with the original release of Windows 95, it shipped with Microsoft Plus!

Technically superior to its two predecessors, XvT runs on Windows, requires a joystick ( the others could be played with a mouse ), features a CD audio soundtrack, supports high resolution graphics, brings texture mapping to the ship models of the in-flight game engine, includes robust multiplayer options for up to eight players in free-for-all, team-based, and cooperative play modes, and has a sophisticated pilot and mission selection system that tracks the player's points and awards.

Later Windows versions do not ship with this driver.

Direct3D 11. 1 is an update to the API that will initially ship with Windows 8.

WinFS was billed as one of the pillars of the " Longhorn " wave of technologies, and would ship as part of the next version of Windows.

It was subsequently decided that WinFS would ship after the release of Windows Vista, but those plans were shelved in June 2006, with some of its component technologies being integrated into upcoming releases of ADO. NET and Microsoft SQL Server.

A common complaint about this device is that it continued to ship with the WM Smartphone 2002 operating system even after most competing Windows Smartphones like the Samsung i600 or HTC Voyager shipped with Windows Mobile 2003 or at least offered an official upgrade path.

Still it was a big problem for the company and Microsoft managed to ship Access a couple of months ahead of Paradox for Windows, a major marketing win to Microsoft.

In 1990 Borland also started work on an internal dBASE clone for both DOS and Windows, written in assembler, which was planned to ship in 1992.

At the same time, CD-ROM developers could ship the Kaleida Media Player with content to support existing Windows and Macintosh systems.

Amongst his creations are the Comic Sans font, often known as the standard typeface for comic and video game text, and the Trebuchet MS font, both of which ship as standard on current releases of Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, with Comic Sans being the least admired.

According to an internal email, Allard was a network engineer responsible for convincing Microsoft to ship TCP / IP in Windows 95.

Because almost all mass-manufactured PCs ship with some version of Microsoft Windows pre-installed, individuals who wish to use operating systems other than Windows ( for example, Linux or BSD ) often choose to build their own computers.

However, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 ship with a 64-bit version of MSDASQL.

1993 saw a release for PCs with Windows 3. 1 as part of the original Microsoft Arcade package.

* Formats with lossless compression, such as FLAC, Monkey's Audio ( filename extension APE ), WavPack ( filename extension WV ), TTA, ATRAC Advanced Lossless, Apple Lossless ( filename extension m4a ), MPEG-4 SLS, MPEG-4 ALS, MPEG-4 DST, Windows Media Audio Lossless ( WMA Lossless ), and Shorten ( SHN ).

* Formats with lossy compression, such as MP3, Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, ATRAC and Windows Media Audio Lossy ( WMA lossy )).

The first Windows NT-based operating system to receive AGP support was Windows NT 4. 0 with service pack 3, introduced in 1997.

Active Directory was previewed in 1999, released first with Windows NT server.

Additional improvements were made in Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and with the release of the latter the domain controller role was renamed Active Directory Domain Services.

Ashton-Tate's product portfolio proved to be weak, with no provision for evolution into the GUI environment of Windows.

Worst of all, the highest revenue earner of the combined company was dBASE with no Windows version ready.

WordPerfect itself was struggling with a late and troubled transition to Windows.

* Microsoft Windows contains application compatibility shims to make the platform compatible with most software from earlier 32-bit and 16-bit versions ( e. g. Civilization ( circa 1991, designed for Windows 3. 0 ) running on Windows Vista ).

** With the introduction of Windows 7 ( Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise editions ), Windows XP Mode enables full compatibility with older programs supported under Windows XP via Microsoft Virtual PC.

It has been ported to Microsoft Windows and distributed with Cygwin and MinGW, to DOS by the DJGPP project, to Novell NetWare and to Android via various terminal emulation applications.

This is effective during boot in text mode and in a DOS box in Windows safe mode with 50 lines.

BeOS PE could be started from within Microsoft Windows or Linux, and was intended to nurture consumer interest in its product and give developers something to tinker with.

* NJStar Software Corp. ( 南极星 Nanjixing ): Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language software solutions for use with Microsoft Windows operating systems.

These are more compliant with Unix terminal standards and user interface conventions than the Cygwin console, but are less suited for running Windows console programs.

* Various utilities are provided for converting between Windows and Unix paths and file formats, for handling line ending ( CRLF / LF ) issues, for displaying the DLLs that an executable is linked with, etc.

The version of gcc that comes with Cygwin has various extensions for creating Windows DLLs, specifying whether a program is a windowing or console mode program, adding resources, etc.