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Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware

Posted by Soulskill on from the do-not-want dept.

MrSeb writes "At Download.com, page designs have been repeatedly tweaked over the years to push its updater software (now called TechTracker), TrialPay offers, and the site's mailing list. Bothersome, perhaps, but certainly not inexcusable. They've got to make money off the site somehow, after all, and banner ads don't always do the job. Now, things have taken a turn for the worse: Cnet has begun wrapping downloads in its own proprietary installer. Not only will this cause the reputation of free, legitimate software to be tarred by Cnet's bloatware toolbars, homepage changes, and new default search engines — but Cnet is even claiming that their installer wrapping is 'for the users.'"

4 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. Wow, when you can't trust CNET by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Jeez, you expect this stuff out of fly-by-night crapware sites. But even I trusted CNET (until now, anyway), and I'm about as cynical a bastard as there is when it comes to downloading software apps off the net.

    So, is Tucows still around? I have occasionally used SourceForge, but I never felt confident they were policing their binaries very well (that could be an unfair presumption on my part).

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:Wow, when you can't trust CNET by _0xd0ad · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I cleaned the Ask toolbar off one of my friends computers after it broke the new tab shortcut and menu item in Firefox. Yeah. "...huh?" The only way to get a new tab was to drag something into the tab bar or open a link in a new tab.

      (found that Ask was the culprit by disabling extensions one at a time until the Ctrl-T shortcut started working again)

      Oh well, nothing of value was lost. I probably would have cleaned it off anyway, but I wanted to know why the shortcut was broken. And it actually surprised me that it was so poorly written that it broke stuff like that.

  2. Re:Driving users to the App Store by isorox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Apple already has an App Store for the Mac, and Microsoft will soon as well for Windows 8.

    Moves like this will drive users in droves to download applications from a known, clean source.

    I've been a fan of a collection of app stores since I moved to Debian 2.2, 11 years ago, nice to see the non-oss world catching up.

  3. Re:A Software Author's Perspective by rabun_bike · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Let me know if you get a response. I had to literally change a credit card number to get Download.com to stop billing me once. Several years ago I created a Download.com account and paid for something. I really cannot remember what other than the software listing. Later I simply attempted to cancel the account but there is no way to cancel. I think I sent 5 support messages and did 2 credit card charge backs before I had to report my card stolen to get them to stop charging me. For several years I would get messages that my card failed to be charged. Yea, no kidding. That was by design.