my 78 year old grandfather recently upgraded his copy of firefox and mysteriously the Yahoo toolbar was installed, and his default search engine and homepage were set to yahoo. firefox should stop being evil.
It's infuriating because it makes (some) users want to avoid these updates which are, presumably, in the interest of the entire community.
Can't they get their ad-revenue somewhere else besides critical security patches???
I need to put something up at updatejava.org one of these days too.
If updates are available, it will offer direct links to updates which are just that. Even for Adobe Flash.
As a bonus you get another nerdmetric for your machine with regard to security :)
We decline obtrusive toolbars and other junk automatically. Software installation is unbelievably terrible on everything but phones.
Linux package managers are pretty good, but if you try to get other software things get weird. Installing Dropbox on Ubuntu is surprisingly bad. You have to click through all these info screens and then have it download the proprietary daemon part. That's one of the reasons we made http://ninite.com/linux
I use a Mac, and we're working on a version for those too. The whole drag from a disk image to the applications folder is really confusing for a large number of users. And anything that makes you click through a .pkg installer is a pain too.
More importantly, your talking about apple's and oranges. He's referring to installing unrelated software that installs browser plugins, like Office, iTunes, or Google Earth or Chrome. If you download a Yahoo! branded firefox, you'll expect to get a Yahoo! branded firefox. If you install iTunes, it shouldn't go around installing other software.
So iTunes shouldn't install software that makes listening to and buying music easier?
I kind of agree that installing plugins without warning is a problem, but sounds like the fix/interface should be in the browser.
Correct. =)
Eh sorry I don't know the answer, been a Safari/Chrome user for a while.
From an end user POV, I think it would be okay to have both the OS permissions grab and a warning from Firefox that new plugins have been installed.
You've already granted the original app (iTunes) permission to install whatever, but it wouldn't be much more of a hassle to have Firefox popup a confirmation box that new stuff has been installed (assuming it doesn't, or at least it didn't on the OP's system).