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A comment on What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective. Parent comment

Re:What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective by ygra on Saturday January 13, 2018 @11:22AM (#16140078)
> Windows has various locations where apps are typically installed or dumped (Program files, Program files x86 , program data, app data...)

To be fair, neither Program Data (which is effectively ALl Users AppData), nor AppData are endorsed as application installation locations by Microsoft. For a variety of reasons. Chrome started quite a trend, though for installations without admin privileges to install to AppData for convenience.

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Re:What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective by Stratoscope on Sunday January 14, 2018 @03:11PM (#16146091)
I'm not sure what not being endorsed means in this context, but I distinctly remember Microsoft going to considerable work back in the days of Windows 2000 to support per-user installations.

The big change was in the registry: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT was no longer a direct shortcut to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes, but instead was a dynamically merged view of that key and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes.

This allowed you to register COM objects for the current user without requiring administrative privileges.

I and many other people were doing per-user installs long before Chrome existed.

This is especially useful for apps that auto-update. If you install in Program Files [(x86)] then you will pop a UAC prompt every time the app updates. If you install per-user it can be a silent update.

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