There are certainly pros and cons to a completely controlled App Store. This is an excellent demonstration of what happens if you remove all the controls and let the market play out on its own.
What happens when you download the top 10 download.com Windows apps
Makes me so happy to be in my little “walled garden.” 🙂
Wow, Windows it’s amazing how much of a steaming pile of shit the Windows desktop experience has morphed in to. Granted, it wasn’t great at all when I left it 20 years ago (or ever), but goddamn.
This has nothing to do with Windows really. This is shitty PC software companies trying to squeeze the every drop of money they can out of people by confusing them to install stuff they don’t want or need.
If it’s a justification for the mac app store, it shouldn’t be, because of how awfully limiting the MAS is. Actually reading what pops on your screen before you click ‘yes’ or ‘continue’ is a pretty good solution.
“Actually reading what pops on your screen before you click ‘yes’ or ‘continue’ is a pretty good solution.”
Dude, that’s the problem, and that’s why the App Store exist. People don’t read, thus we need the App Store.
Well people have to accept some amount of responsibility. They don’t say yes to every door to door salesman that comes past. They can do the same for this. The way Apple restricts the app store kills it. I’d be fine if the rules were no bundling craplications, and no malware, but it goes way beyond that to devs leaving the MAS because of lame restrictions. iOS I understand more, but not the OS X.
It’s not Windows’ fault.
Someone could do exactly the same thing with OSX, or very close to it.
Note that a human being had to “OK” those installs, and while they don’t mention it, unless they turned authentication off, they even had to OS-level-OK the installs with UAC elevation to, well, double-OK them.
The dancing bunny problem has nothing to do with the OS, sadly.
That article’s a great confluence of awful things (Windows, CNet, freeware aggregators that offer paid placement), central to which is a product category created specifically for corporate support yet also blithely marketed to consumers, which — surprise! — requires specialized knowledge to avoid being taken advantage of.
Nerd apologists notwithstanding, this has everything to do with the environment in which Microsoft created Windows, with a free-for-all marketplace that resulted in decades of ignoring the rise of malware opportunists, and a prevailing passivity most non-tech-aware consumers were trained to adopt in the face of engineers’ contempt for them.
Even Microsoft eventually threw its corporate hands up at the task of repairing damage done to a PC by everyday use. Their response: “We can’t even. Just nuke and pave. Go hire a nerd to do it.”
“RTFM” is not a response, it’s a cultural evasion of responsibility, institutionalized by misanthropes.
I got a copy of MacCleaner installed thanks to a too-hasty install of a package from sourceforge. Same way all of these work: via a confusing installer and all-too hasty clicking on the ‘Next’ button. Hell even Oracle does this with the execrable “Ask” browser hijacker.
Not just shitty PC companies but shitty PC tech sites.
They’ll run an article on how to stay safe on the net and alert you to the latest threat meanwhile the nasties are sitting just a few clicks away on their downloads page.
I gave up reading their articles for this very reason.