And that was a pretty bad solution. Nobody wants to see "this web page doesn't display correctly because you're missing the bla bla plug-in".

For the hundredth time, I miss Amiga’s “datatypes” system. You’d download a sound or image or video or compression library and drop it in the right place to register it with the OS. Then any app which used the OS’s built-in system for opening media files automatically got support for that format, without changing a line of code.

Imagine if installing libzstd meant that every program on your computer suddenly knew how to use ZSTD compression, or adding libjpegxl added support to every browser, word processor, and age editor you’d already installed.

Some parts of AmigaOS were wonky, like lack of memory protection. Others would still be phenomenally useful today.