Comment by Dylan16807
5 days ago
Well ProgramData didn't exist when they designed it, and the crime of putting their folder in the wrong place is a pretty minor one. They don't change the permissions of anything outside Steam.
It doesn't "reduce or disable default Windows security settings" in a meaningful way if you say to yourself "that folder effectively is in ProgramData, but spelled wrong".
CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA is the API call to get this special folder which has been around since <checks notes> Windows 2000, 26 years ago.
You should never hardcode the path since it can and has moved around, though MS has implemented hard links to legacy paths because most developers are stupid and against persistent better advice do it anyway. I've seen multi-million dollar software packages whose vendor requires it to be writable by "Everyone".
Steam was first released in 2003, three years later.
For 80% of grievances about Windows, there is likely a solution in place that no one knows about because they didn't read the documentation.
Steam's original system requirements in the 2002 beta included Windows 98. [1]
They didn't stop advertising Win98 support until sometime in early 2007.
Granted, Steam back then was a different creature than Steam now.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020605222619/http://www.steamp...
So you're saying they've had 18+ years to remove legacy cruft put in there to support a nearly 28 year old legacy OS that had no real multi-user support and basically zero security?
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And steam was originally released to be compatible with Windows 98. windows 2000 wasn't widely used as a consumer installed OS.
> windows 2000 wasn't widely used as a consumer installed OS
But Windows XP, which came out in 2001, inherited everything from Windows 2000 and more, and was used extensively for gaming.
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Back when it was actually AppData in the user documents folder, that doesn't seem like the right place to install many gigabytes of games.
And it's the same permissions either way. This isn't about permissions, it's about where they put the folder.