Slashdot Mirror
Windows is Bloated, Thanks to Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (bit.ly)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the weekend, I put together a little tool that scans executable files for PNG images containing useless Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) metadata. I ran it against a vanilla Windows 10 image and was surprised that Windows contains a lot of this stuff. Adobe XMP, generally speaking, is an Adobe technology that serializes metadata like titles, internal identifiers, GPS coordinates, and color information into XML and jams it into things, like images. This data can be extremely valuable in some cases but Windows doesn't need or use this stuff. It just eats up disk space and CPU cycles. Thanks to horrible Adobe Photoshop defaults, it's very easy to unknowingly include this metadata in your final image assets. So easy, almost all the images on this site are chock full of it. But you can appreciate my surprise when a bunch of important Windows binaries showed up in my tool.
Now if that was the only source of bloat in all of windows, we'd just get rid of it and we'd be all set.
Full Stop.
crazy dynamite monkey
So Adobe photoshop puts metadata in PNG images that can cause "bloat".
OK.
Riddle me this batman: Why the hell should the Explorer.exe binary compiled from C code have 20% of its bytes be from an Adobe photoshop metadata tool? Ditto for a DLL that's not a PNG asset?
I think this guy ran a program that misinterpreted some bytes in a binary since it's not really designed to be a general-purpose parser and then jumped to a really really dumb conclusion.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
/. doesn't care about bloat...
the bit.ly link goes to https://www.thurrott.com/windo...
The Windows executable loader doesn't look at this extraneous XMP data so why would it consume CPU cycles?
As can be seen from the link in his comment section, the total of wasted space his tool found was 5MB. On a whole windows system, comprising several GB.
Even if his tool didn't just find some false positives, that's basically nothing at all.
Nothing to see here, move along.
http://tinypng.com .... That's what it's for...
Ok, Windows users, the rest of us have been telling you how Windows is a nightmare on many levels for years, nay, decades. If you are shocked about anything Windows 10 does, you have been ignoring the people around you ergo you only have yourself to blame at this point. Stop making excuses and make a clean break from Windows forever.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
MY GOD :-D Such a good laugh, thanks. Look, little kid, if Microsoft doesn't care about using all sorts of C++ shitty stuff on their code and putting hundreds of processes eating memory to spy on the users, do you really think they would care about such a detail? Blame the poor optimization culture we have had for so many years thanks to the "everyone can code with high level programming languages" misguided idea.
The couple of kilobytes per file for some XML stream is minuscule and immaterial, a few
megabytes per computer. MS is smart to not step over a dollar to pick up a penny.
The REAL bloat comes from Executable code modules' executable code, lack of a proper package management system for DLL dependencies And keeping around multiple preceding revisions of each library with SXS backups as a system is updated by Windows update, or keeping unnecessary libraries around as software is uninstalled; However, on the plus side.... programs suddenly stop working from missing/incompatible DLLs less often.
I suppose art becomes more important in Windows10 as the interface gets more complicated and uses more image assets in it, but NOT the XML metadata. Not when the XML uses 1 kilobyte on a 1 Megabyte plus image file.
Though XMP was developed by Adobe it is now an ISO standard. Also almost every editor or camera will include XMP data, not just photoshop
...my iPhone keeps running out of space. All of the photos I take with it are storing that dad-gum EXIF data. *sarcasm inserted*
...I wrote a tool to find duplicate files in Windows NT.
I was very careful to not include links (believe it or not NT supported the equivalent of unix Hard Links and SoftLinks), and also once suspicious duplicates were found - first I sorted by file size, then check-summed duplicate sized files, then matching files got the bytewise comparison - a bytewise comparison was performed to ensure an exact match before naming culprits.
It was always a source of amazement to find the exact same file located in at least 3 different sub-directories of Windows/System. Thankfully I stopped using Windows not long after NT 3.51, so I was spared the torture of Windows as it is today.
Looks like we still haven't learned!
Twinstiq, game news
https://imageoptim.com/
The bloat is so bad that for a long time I had co-workers who only wanted to use GIF because "PNG files are much bigger". They just could not accept that Adobe was the problem until I ran their Photoshop-saved PNGs into ImageOptim, giving us PNG files smaller than the GIF version.
#DeleteFacebook
I used to run all of my .png images through a program called PNGcrush. It stripped out meta-data, set a pallet, optimized all of the compression and in the end it actually lowered the size of each individual image appreciably. This was important since much of the world was still on dial-up back then.
When I'm doing anything that isn't a slopped together hack job for myself I shave ever KB I can.
Last year I made an instructional video for my company on how to add your own printers in Windows by browsing the print server and double-clicking. Full color, audio, everything, the resulting M4V file was 1.1 MB - and it didn't look crappy. I just consider it professional to think of every KB.
You mean like optipng -strip all? Why reinvent the wheel?
Might as well use optipng -o7 -zm1-9 -strip all for higher gains...
..This is trivial.
MS is slways testing my existing fallible hardware and peripherals, looking for changes, as though to prove the existing configuration doesnt match the software and thus I need to re-install or pay for another install of the same OS on the same computer.
CMOS BIOS never did this to me!
Okay, we've got file header data being sent to MS (who recently disclosed the data collected confirming this), pushing ads through it's "live tile" interface, the Superfetch (whose effectiveness is in doubt but it's use of memory is not) and monitoring services to ensure you don't copy media data MS partenrs don't like. Come on. This was bloatware before Adobe. Now Adobe has long had more bloatware and adware, plus the new ad javascript tags Adobe is putting out on websites. MS windows takes a lot of your control from the updates (which is really dangerous as you could get a bad update, 3 times so far MS...) ensuring they can push even more adservers on your OS whenver they want. If we want this to stop we need to cut these guys off by the knees: Just stop using it MacOS or Linux (Linux Mint is the best or new users http://www.linuxmint.com/ ) can do wonders.
We've had stuff shoved up our butts that benefit MS at our expense for long enough. Let's all tell MS to stop. Many of us use tablets and phones anyway. Unless you are a gamer, we don't need windows 8-10. Wait, you can do gaming on consoles or Steam on Linux/MacOS who game library is rapidly expanding. So.....we don't need Windows 8-10 even as a gamer.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
"Thanks to horrible Adobe Photoshop defaults, it's very easy to unknowingly include this metadata in your final image assets."
If you're saving for the web, use the "save for web and devices" option and it should strip out most, if not all, extraneous data. That's why it's there. If you just do File -> Save As it'll include other stuff.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Over the weekend, somebody put together a useless tool that scans executable files for PNG images containing useless Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) metadata. Some small amount of extra data was found, and a report was written about it. The report might be useful to somebody, but slashdot doesn't need or use this stuff. Thanks to editors and reviewers who don't pay any attention, it's very easy for these reports to get published amongst actual news. So easy, many news sites like reddit are chock full of them. But you can appreciate my surprise when I discovered the report on slashdot itself!
This is what I consider Fake News. Someone is seriously concerned about the meta data in their image files taking up space? Are they still using floppy disks? How is a few MB of meta data considered bloat? Dumb
My Windows 10 inflates up to 20GB in just a couple of weeks, and I have honestly no idea where the data comes from. I definitely did not install software or add files amounting to those extra 12GB, so what the hell is that content and where does it come from?
It's not that the 12GB of space is costly, it's just the mystery of it, and the feeling that Microsoft is in control of my HDD, not me.
We have finally solved one of the biggest mysteries for the past 30 years: Why is Microsoft Windows so bloated? Adobe, those bastards. I suspect that was Adobe's plan all along. It's clear Adobe sought to sabotage Microsoft's efforts so that they could supplant them in the OS market with their own operating system.
We'll make great pets
I used to [use a tool to de-bloat images] This was important since much of the world was still on dial-up back then.
It is still important.
- Some of the world is STILL on dial-up. Even in the US. (especially the rural part: At my vacation/retirement ranch I had only 28kbps until AT&T upgraded the cell tower to LTE last year).
- Some of the "high-speed internet" isn't very - like DSL at 1.5 or 6 Mbps, or WISPs serving an entire town with what amounts to a WiFi hotspot.
- Some services charge by the bandwidth used.
- Some services throttle back "heavy users"
- Some services sell tiered usage, with higher prices for larger monthly data caps, and killing the link (e.g. prepaid), drastically throttling down (e.g. 4G dropping to 3G speed), and/or charging punitive "overage" rates for bandwidth beyond the pre-purchased tier.
- As the users get farther away, latency and setup-turnaround for the components of a web page display also slow the process.
Web developers tend to work with disks and servers built into their machine or attached by a fast LAN. So it's easy to miss that the actual users' experience may be slower - even drastically so. (Thus was the web, at the dawn of image-laden web pages, nicknamed the "World Wide Wait".) And they're not charged for that bandwidth, so they also don't get their noses rubbed in the price of it when they receive their monthly bills or hit their monthly caps.
So keeping a web page's bandwidth use small is still useful:
- Even on broadband it makes it quicker - "snappier" - which improves the user experience.
- It can reach a wider audience, as those on slower or more latent links don't give up in disgust.
- It saves some users substantial money.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Windows 10 does come with lots of location and tracking services. This must all be part of the implementation. At location XML tags to all of the files and they can track who uploads illegal copies of Windows to a torrent - then automate sending the authorities to your house.
I wonder how much of this stuff is really leftover Adobe metadata and how much is components of malware?
With 20% to 40% of the code/data space of major applications composed of "along for the ride" data that's never interpreted, there's a LOT of room for malware to park itself, its redundant copies, its resources, and its purloined data without having to actually create files of its own.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
MS and the folks that create the hardware it runs on have been in cahoots for decades to make sure that you continue to buy hardware as you upgrade your OS.
While it's true that windows has been bloated since Windows 95 and NT 4(Yes, NT 4 was bloated...), it's never been more true than it is today. The code is poorly written, not optimized properly, and full of junk... and that's not just an opinion... after working at MS for a number of years the shit I and several friends observed was beyond belief... The code is generally written to be stable, but it's not necessarily optimized for performance... why? Because newer hardware and more ram will ensure that newer less efficient code is just as fast or faster than previous versions. And that's the assumption that most of the dev teams at MS are told to make. The exception to this is the kernel and core app teams... in the last few versions they were tasked with making the code not just more stable, but to also make if more efficient if possible... so that windows will boot and run as fast or faster than previous versions, at least to a point... many of the optional services and applications are still beyond bloated and slower than ever before.
One of the long time senior devs in the kernel team once made a comment at lunch... he said that if MS still practiced the same coding techniques they used back when hardware was a limiting factor in what they could do, back in the 386/486 days, that windows would be 1/10th the size and 3-5 times faster while only using half the memory... and that he was pretty sure it would never happen since throwing that much money at optimizing the code isn't in the best interest of the hardware industry upon which MS relies on.
Thanks to horrible Adobe Photoshop defaults
Yeah it's absolutely horrible that an image editor faithfully saves data the same way it opens it without silently stripping things out. Oh the humanity of opening and saving a picture I took and finding out the metadata which was originally recorded is still intact.
What's even worse is that there's a dedicated save dialogue to share data which gives people the option of not destroying their metadata when they hit save. What a horrible horrible idea.
The entire bloat on disk is about 5MiB in size. For an OS around 20GiB, that is less than 0.1% bloat from this issue. It is also only an issue with a small handful of files (we're talking like 5-10 files total, a bunch of which are just SxS copies of explorer.exe)
This should have just been reported as a simple bug in explorer.exe, not turned into a witch hunt claiming to be THE BLOAT of Windows. This is next to nothing overall.
Source: The guy uploaded his entire scan dump: https://gist.githubusercontent...
I ain't installing that shit.
If I post a picture (more so of the kids) I'll scrub it of EXIF data, didn't know of adobe XML.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From 4.7 MB down to 1.3 MB. I don't think binaries should be compressible that much.
Mint is bloated because of Gnome / Cinnamon. Strip that out, along with Samba, and replace it with LXDE and the footprint drops significantly. They even have a distro already rolled for that.
The other issue is .deb files. Clean them out of /var/cache/apt/archives every so often using sudo rm -f /var/cache/apt/archives/*. Do this and you can keep the entire OS with productivity software to less than 10GB.
With a fresh install of Windows 8 or 10, I can't even perform the first round of security updates with less than 25GB of HDD space.
Embedded resources..
Seriously - get a life.