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Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

> Has anybody in HN worked with a company which does this crapware bundling, let alone creating?

If anyone here has worked for Adobe (Flash included crapware for a long time), Oracle (Java updates used to or still do include crapware), Google (browser toolbar was crapware), or Apple (Quicktime for Windows attempted to install iTunes and Safari), then yes.

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Every sane piece of Mac software: download a big disk image (dmg), mount it, copy the application folder to /Applications. To uninstall, drag it to the trash.

Adobe software: download a tiny disk image, launch the hideous Adobe installer program, give it root, have it download and install God-knows-what to God-knows-where. To uninstall, open a terminal and go medieval on everything with a name containing "Adobe", "Macromedia", "Flash", etc.

Adobe creates the most user-hostile software that is not pure malware.

Adobe creates the most user-hostile software that is not pure malware.

I have always had a problem with adobe, and I used to say it was because 'they specialize in non-standards', but I think you have a much better point. It just feels like you're getting screwed every time you see that A.

> 'they specialize in non-standards'

I think you have the nub of it here. I first learned to loathe Adobe almost 20 years ago, with Acrobat for X11. Every other X11 program would spawn a new process and a new window when you typed "program ... &" in your xterm, but "acroread ... &" would talk to the One True Acroread Ur-process instead. This, of course, caused all sorts of unpleasant and non-standard behavior when opening and closing PDF files. Not to mention that the interface was a bloated nightmare compared to xdvi and ghostview.

Then they bought Macromedia and Flash, with its ability to create non-standard horrors on the web. It was like watching the formation of a black hole of abusive software, and I still wait for AOL and RealPlayer to be sucked in by Adobe's evil gravitational pull.

They have, sadly, been doing this on MacOS for years. It was like that in the Classic days as well, they were always one of the few companies who actually used an installer, and cleaning up after one was an annoying process of combing extension and preference folders for lingering cruft. Fortunately there were apps to help find useless leftovers, but it was still a pain compared to how otherwise pleasant the MacOS software experience generally is.

Whenever you install Chrome (not sure if other Google product that does the same),

you got GoogleUpdate as ..

  - startup trigger
  - firefox addon (!!)
  - scheduled task

And it's not Google alone, big players are the worst malware distributors as part of they _own_ products

Stallman was ALWAYS right.

Ah, GoogleUpdate... Trying out Chrome gave me the unfortunate opportunity to learn about launchctl(1), Apple's version of cron(8). I haven't used Apple software on Windows in awhile, or vice versa, but I bet both are similarly awful. I didn't know about the Firefox addon, but that's a clever little extra bit of evil.

So, while I may be a baby-killing enabler (I work for the DoD), at least I've never bundled crapware with my software.

The truth is, if you look far enough, you can always find something to be guilty about. I'm not going to blame programmers working for any of those companies, but I will squarely place the blame on companies with hypocritical culture.

Apple upper management: Hey, let's bundle all this crap with something that people actually want!

Years later

Apple upper management: Wow! People are bundling crap with things that people actually want! We should put a stop to that by fucking over our customers' right to choose in a free market!

Ooh, that's right. Stupid Ask toolbar in the Java updates.

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