How many different media players would you say you have? 1 or 2? More?

I've lost count. There used to be the old classic windows media player of yore. It worked. It was fine. Then Microsoft started updating it. The screams of anguish could not be heard, due to an unsupported codec. Written complaints came in, but the addresses were in so many different formats that the postal service didn't know how to deal with them. A commitee was set up to try and sort out the problem but all the members kept stealing the file [extensions] off each other.

Mp3 changed a lot of things. We accept that now, but why you have to have so many media players installed on a PC (with a windows setup at least) is just annoying. KMPlayer is probably my favourite. It hasn't stumbled on anything I've asked of it so far. Windows media player fails at failing. Quicktime? Seems to work well enough for the web, but if you've got your MIME settings wrong, it's just plain old broken. Winamp does well enough with its plugins, but I can never be sure if it'll work. The whole multi window GUI isn't really to my liking either.

Hopefully, we'll someday have a fully seamless browser that plays flash, quicktime, java, mkv and all the other formats we don't really need. KMPlayer already does this to a fine degree for audio and video files.

If you're a Firefox user like myself, you'll know Firefox has regular issues with flash updates, quicktime updates. adobe reader updates... Often, flash finds itself completely baked-on to the point that there's a special uninstaller to try and degrease your system before every update. It's a fiddly little problem to fix. Some sites will let you get your video without any problems. Others will squeal 'computer says no' repeatedly.

Updates don't always make things better. Safer, yes (usually). Better? Well, 1Windows media player is now bloatier than ever. What business does a simple media player have with being a web browser? IE 6 used to be known for its small footprint. Certainly, there are browsers that are very lightweight and nippy when configured correctly. And adobe reader, the chief offender, seems to get slower and slower every time the version number goes up. Almost funny, but I hate waiting. Adobe 8 - 5 times slower than Adobe 3? Not far wrong I'm afraid. They've pulled the same trick with the Macromedia software. For shame!

Old hardware is a lot harder to get rid of than you might think. That's why it's good to keep old software about. The question is though - how long does a developer need to be held accountable for their old software? 2-5 years? Longer? What if the company goes bust and a critical file extension is left unsupported? What if your files were left unsupported?