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Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash

#51

Post by pyre »

Finster wrote: post #37
ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #30

Ninite was a godsend in the days before I moved our offices over to Chrome. It was the first tool that took the pain and suffering out of updating Reader, Flash, and Java without the worries of crapware ending up on workstations. Thanks to this move, I'll be banning the flash plugin outright. I hope that makes Adobe happy.

With Netflix moving to HTML5, and Youtube already supporting HTML5, there's fewer reasons to even bother with Flash or Silverlight plugins.

Except for the videos on YouTube that don't support HTML5 yet. From here[1]:

  | Additional Restrictions (we are working on these!)
  | 
  | - Some videos with ads are not yet supported (they
  |   will play in the Flash player)
  |
  | - On Firefox and Opera, only videos with WebM
  |   transcodes will play in HTML5
  |
  | - If you've opted in to other testtube experiments,
  |   you may not get the HTML5 player (Feather is
  |   supported, though)
[1] http://www.youtube.com/html5

Re: Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash

#52

Post by joosters »

mschuster91 wrote: post #24
bluedino wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Referral links/searches

Sure, but how can this game be successful when the toolbar is active / dominant in the browser only for a couple of days until the user downloads yet another crapware bundle?

I wonder if any of the toolbars have extra code to try and nobble further toolbar installers. Perhaps there is a coding war going on between the crapware providers, fighting to be the top of the URL-rewriting chain?

Re: Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash

#54

Post by doron »

We use Ninite Pro extensively within our network. Not only does it allow remote updates (whereas locally it requires administrative rights most users don't have) it also allows disabling of update notification and disabling of shortcuts.

The update process Adobe employs is a nag for admins, the constant flow of acrobat updates and flash updates is a bombardment of announcements which most users in a corporate environment don't have control over.

I prefer paying ninite for the hassle free service, rather then adobe who seem to have no clue or interest in making users life easier. From my perspective, i don't care who profits as long as I can achieve my goals with a minimum of hassle. Ninite provides this, Adobe does not.

Re: Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash

#55

Post by mschuster91 »

joosters wrote: post #52
mschuster91 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but how can this game be successful when the toolbar is active / dominant in the browser only for a couple of days until the user downloads yet another crapware bundle?

I wonder if any of the toolbars have extra code to try and nobble further toolbar installers. Perhaps there is a coding war going on between the crapware providers, fighting to be the top of the URL-rewriting chain?

Likely they have. I had to completely wipe a Firefox profile of a customer because ten toolbars had messed up the search engines so hard that I could not add Google back.

Re: Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash

#57

Post by swies »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #10

This article is a bit... lacking. First off, the Flash updater on Windows works quite well on modern Windows systems. Second off, Ninite isn't just some good Samaritan, they're a for-profit company. Third, and related to the second, Ninite's updater costs $10 a year while Adobe Flash's built-in updater is free. They also have a Ninite Pro version that supports remote updates and installs and costs $240 to $2,220 per…

First I want to say thanks! We love your work at PortableApps.com and send people there whenever they ask us to add portable software.

Our value is keeping the catalog up-to-date and putting a nice interface around the updating process. Not ad-blocking.

We actively uncheck toolbars for maybe 5 apps. If those apps removed their toolbar offers people would still use Ninite to track updates and automate work.

On profits XOR good: We do make money, but we also work really hard to do good as in http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

Our website is completely free (and ad-free) for home users. We save people from about 15 minutes of mindless installer work every second.

Our $9.99 home Updater product is just something to point home users at when they ask to donate to us. We're a company. We don't take donations.

We also run http://ninite.com/accessible to help visually-impaired people manage software. Actually, until last summer that was about the only way for people to install Flash with a screenreader http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/2012/07/flash-player-in...

If publishers want to make updating their software artificially hard there's not a lot we can do except trust that people will see what's going on and move to other products.

Re: Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash

#58

Post by tjoff »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #10

This article is a bit... lacking. First off, the Flash updater on Windows works quite well on modern Windows systems. Second off, Ninite isn't just some good Samaritan, they're a for-profit company. Third, and related to the second, Ninite's updater costs $10 a year while Adobe Flash's built-in updater is free. They also have a Ninite Pro version that supports remote updates and installs and costs $240 to $2,220 per…

"First off, the Flash updater on Windows works quite well on modern Windows systems."

No, just no. Btw. anyone knows how to manually force flash to check for updates? And an easy way to check flash versions across all different browsers?

Re: Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash

#60

Post by astrodust »

doron wrote: post #54

We use Ninite Pro extensively within our network. Not only does it allow remote updates (whereas locally it requires administrative rights most users don't have) it also allows disabling of update notification and disabling of shortcuts. The update process Adobe employs is a nag for admins, the constant flow of acrobat updates and flash updates is a bombardment of announcements which most users in a corporate environ…

If your users get used to clicking "yeah, whatever" on any and all software update pop-ups, this will almost certainly become an attack vector. Adobe Reader, Flash and Oracle's Java each have their own nuisance updaters that are constantly pestering you for attention.

That software-updates-as-a-service is now a thing is really a sad state of affairs, but if Ninite can make a go of it, right on.

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