Windows File Type Fail

It is that time of year when I rant about an awful, awful, awful feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system. This year the subject of my diatribe is file types. You see, Windows thinks that every file has a type and the type connects the file to a program that can handle it. Like many "features" in Windows, file types are intended to make your life easier while in practice doing the opposite. Note that some time ago, I wrote about file systems and Content Management as opposed to a file type manager. I still think there are some good ideas in there that need to be explored.

If you do not know what a file type is, here is a primer. Every file has a name. The file type is a usually 3 letter extension to the name. So for example, the program for Windows Explorer, is called "explorer.exe", the dot is a separator and exe is the file type. The type exe means a program that Windows can run. To look at all the file types on an XP system, bring up the control panel, select Folder Options and then click the File Types tab. On Vista and 7, the path through the control panel is slightly different. The dialog shows a huge list of registered file types and the programs that will handle them. Note that the first few entries in the list are not representative, go down to the middle or bottom of the list so see what it is really all about.

Windows goes to great length to hide file types from you. By default they are not shown anywhere and you can go for a long time without even knowing that files have types. One way to run into file types is to double click on a file with a type that Windows does not know about. Windows shows a dialog asking you what program you want to use with it. You can either look up the file type on the web or select a program from a list. The most annoying aspect is that when you select a program from a list, there is a little check box that says "Always use the selected program to open this type of file." If you test a program that does not work without unchecking the box the mistake is remembered and thereafter every time you open a file of that type, the wrong program is chosen. If you uncheck the box, a mistake is not remembered, however neither is a success. Either way, you can lose. Moreover, to recover from a mistake, you have to find the entry for the file extension in the File Types window discussed above and delete it, which is not a trivial task, given the number of file types.

Another little problem with file types is that they can be wrong, confused or direct Windows to do the wrong thing. I wrote about a problem with .avi files from a Canon camera breaking Windows Explorer. There are security issues where Windows is penetrated because it trusts the file type information and then does the wrong thing with a broken file.

However, the real problem with file types appears when you install a new program. Programs are greedy. They want to control as much of your experience as possible so they will try to register as many different file types as they can. If you have one program that deals with a type of file and you install another program that deals with similar files, the new program should pop up a dialog asking you which types of files it should handle. Then you have to make all sorts of complicated decisions about which file types the new program should handle.

Programs for handling media are the worst in this respect because there are lots of different media types and it is common to have several media players installed to handle different special cases. For example, on my home computer I have Windows Media Player and a DVD player because they came with the system. Then there is iTunes for my iPod, the QuickTime video player that comes with iTunes, a RealPlayer for the BBC iPlayer and finally a program for ripping and burning CDs and DVDs. There may well be other media players amongst the shovelware preinstalled on the box. There are also programs for editing specific media types like at least two picture editors and a video editor or several.

A typical scenario is that you are installing a new media player program because you want to use it to view a particular type of media. Unfortunately, the program installer knows about all the media types that it can handle and asks you to chose what media types types it should handle. Thus you have to disengage your thoughts from the one media type that is the object of your attention and instead start to think about all those other media types that you are not interested in. Unfortunately, there is the worry that if you give in to the new media player and let it handle certain types of media, other things will stop working. Maybe you will not be able to watch videos, or maybe videos will stop syncing with your portable media player because you changed the program associations with a particular file type. Given the complexity of these systems, who knows what may go wrong.

I said that the media player installer should ask you which file types you want associated with the program. A few years ago, Real managed to destroy much of their franchise by not playing nice and fair with file types. The RealPlayer installer switched all file types that it could handle to use the RealPlayer without bothering to ask or notify. Worse, if you went in and installed another program that changed the file type associations or even tried used the File Types dialog screen to change file type associations, it would just change them back to the RealPlayer, again without a notification. When this came to light, many people, myself included, uninstalled RealPlayer and swore never to install any software from Real again. Recently I caved on this resolution so that I could listen to old BBC radio shows like "The Goon Show" with the BBC iPlayer which it turns out to be just a rebadged Real player.

Since the RealPlayer imbroglio, installer programs have been a lot more careful about asking users about file types, but that just throws the problem back to the user. As the whole point of file types is to hide system complexity from the user, this it is no solution at all. A better path is to do without file types. Why are they necessary? Do they really serve a purpose? Other operating systems get along fine without file types, so why does Windows need them. Lets just throw them out and make life easier.