Huh? Windows XP was the first NT-based release for home users. It was a milestone in stability.
What most people remember of XP now is what it became after a couple of years of fixes and improvements, and the contrast with Vista.
Yes, it became more stable with the service packs, but it was a significantly more stable OS out of the gates than anything consumer users had been getting.
Rampant malware was a separate (and very significant) issue.
That much is true.
> It was mostly a wash vs Windows 2000.
No, not really. They did some empirical testing at the university I went to and the conclusion was that they kept the Windows boxes on 2k almost until Vista.
It was also far more secure, but it was still not nearly secure enough.
> ”Upon its release, Windows XP received critical acclaim, noting increased performance and stability (especially compared to Windows Me)…”
> It was also far more secure, but it was still not nearly secure enough.
That's one way to say "plagued by a decade of botnets."
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP
Now google XP blue screen of death. Still alive and well then.
If the bar is Microsoft's most loathed release, then I guess you could call it stable and secure.
Weird that contemporary articles praised its stability then.
> That's one way to say "plagued by a decade of botnets."
No, it’s a way of saying that it introduced real identity-based security isolation to the OS. Prior to this every user had full access to the entire system incisions everyone else’s data who shared the system.
Unfortunately Windows XP was not hardened to the reality of the internet. (Nor were any of its predecessors.)