Comment by chuckadams

I suppose Java didn't offer too many alternatives to checking the OS version the standard way, but I really have a hard time imagining MS bending over backwards to support that approach on that platform. There wasn't even a need to check for the "windows 9", the code was already checking for a Windows platform and would have worked the same without it. Avoiding confusion in the minds of the end users is still the most plausible explanation to me.