Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by oofoe » Thu, May 02, 2013, 11:29 AM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #123

oofoe wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem for me (and maybe Piriform?) is that now I don't have any of their products on my systems because I can't get them through Ninite. I used to religiously install their CCleaner, their defrag and system information tools. They're all very good, but I'm not going to walk through three separate installers for something that Ninite used to do in seconds. When I bring up a new system, I just go to Ninite, c…

I'd wager they are more concerned with preserving their paid revenue stream than losing a few free users. Any company offering a freemium product has to strike that balance.

Well, I did say "maybe"... I guess what I was trying to get at is that before I would enthusiastically recommend their products to other people. Now I don't use them, so I never mention them to anyone.

I don't seem to have a problem using separate installers for something like Blender, but the activation energy seems too high for installing "small" utilities[1].

That said, if I could get larger applications from Ninite, I'd pull from there in a heartbeat!

[1] Utilities may not /actually/ be small.

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

#132

Post by exDM69 » Thu, May 02, 2013, 12:03 PM UTC

FreezerburnV wrote: post #19

Svip wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is common on Windows. When you are on their website to install Flash, there is a tick box you need to untick to avoid installing McAfee Anti-Virus with it. It is basically like the Ask toolbar bundled with Java. If you are not paying attention - which most people don't - you'll be installing unwanted software, because so much relies on basically crappy software (Flash and Java). Actually, that makes them crap…

As a developer, I kind of take offense to the allegations of Java (and Flash as well, I suppose, it's supposed to be pretty good) being "crappy software". The JVM is actually a rather awesome piece of software which offers good performance and good garbage collection. And interesting new languages have been created and flourished on top of the JVM. (Scala, Clojure) Please know the difference between bad/customer unfr…

For the average consumer, "Java" is crapware. It has a horrible security track record, to the point where many national computer security advocates recommend removing Java from your computer. You get constant nagging from the Java auto updater, which you must attend to or you place yourself at risk. And it installs toolbars.

On my Windows gaming box I get a dialog box that says jusched.exe : cannot verify certificate of somesubdomain.oracle.com. I don't know if I'm more or less at risk if I press "no", but I guess the average user is just going to press "yes". So I guess my Java is now out of date but I'm not going to install software with admin privileges if there's a problem in validating certificates.

I will never ever install Java on a Windows box again. I did install it because I wanted to play a game written in Java. The game was unplayable because it was so slow and jerky - because it was written in Java.

There may be bits and pieces of cool tech inside, but for the vast majority of computer users, Java is crapware.

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

#133

Post by ancarda » Thu, May 02, 2013, 12:41 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #51

Finster wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, thou…

The YouTube HTML 5 player is basically done now, it works just as well as the flash one. I wish they would stop "experimenting" and roll this out across the site. They seem to have no timeframe for releasing it.

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

#134

Post by JohnTHaller » Thu, May 02, 2013, 2:43 PM UTC

oofoe wrote: post #131

JohnTHaller wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager they are more concerned with preserving their paid revenue stream than losing a few free users. Any company offering a freemium product has to strike that balance.

Well, I did say "maybe"... I guess what I was trying to get at is that before I would enthusiastically recommend their products to other people. Now I don't use them, so I never mention them to anyone. I don't seem to have a problem using separate installers for something like Blender, but the activation energy seems too high for installing "small" utilities[1]. That said, if I could get larger applications from Nini…

If you don't mind using the portable versions of the larger apps like Blender, you can install the PortableApps.com Platform on your local hard drive and install and update all of those apps in a couple clicks. (Our portable apps work just fine locally, they just won't appear in your start menu by default, you have to add a shortcut manually or launch them using the PA.c Platform) Apps like Blender, Inkscape, GIMP, LibreOffice, GnuCash, Scribus, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.