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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.
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.
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
Except that Adobe actually made the standard open rather than just open enough to break, implemented the standard in their own software in the same was as the public toolkit they made available under the BSD license rather than killing it with their own software, and promoted it to get wide spread and compatible acceptance for both proprietary and open source software that touches media.
The only thing XMP and OOXML share in common is the first three letters in their standard designation.