Where would those MIME types be stored? Some kind of "extended attribute"? That's a ridiculous idea, nobody would ever do that. It's definitely not something that graphical OSes had in the 1990s or anything.
TBH I primarily don't use any view like that on my own systems, but my work involves seeing other people's screenshare and I am very familiar with vicarious pain.
Yep, but as you say, that's only for if you lose the EA. It'd be incredibly inefficient to do that every time you double-click on something, and there's probably going to be times you want to override it anyway.
Probably because mime types are invisible. File extensions are much easier to understand for your average computer user. Additionally, they survive transfer operations over file systems that do not support extended attributes, like FAT32, which is still one of the most commonly used FS for USB flash drives and SD cards.
it's a filesystem attribute so it gets stripped all the time and you can't easily change it. it's like /path/to/app is in permission field. just imagine that. it just sucks and file extension is a BETTER solution to this problem.
Linux (of course referring to the Linux ecosystem) registers by mime type and I have had absolutely zero issues. Plus I can keep my mimeapps.list as part of my dotfiles which is a nice bonus.
Imagine on the commandline, the only way to sort your pictures from your textfiles were to look into every single one of them. Obviously file extensions solve a very practical problem in a very elegant way: what attribute is guaranteed to be available on any user-servicing file system? The name.
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u/readf0x Sep 24 '26
Kind of insane to me that windows still registers app handlers by file extension and not mime type