All I wanted was the latest Flash Player. Without asking, let alone permission, I also get Google Chrome and toolbar. Why do I have to put time and effort into removing them? It's simple you say? Actually it's not, because after I removed them the URL association was no longer present on my PC, I could click on http links in Outlook Express and they wouldn't work. And my "default browser" settings were not adjusted back. This is not my version of a clean uninstall.

Am I the only one sick and tired of such arrogant pricks?

most likely it was a option you had to deselect, although its not often very obvious as i got a request of some extra software sometimes that was disguised as an agreement for the actual softwar i tried to install....

so i agree most of those software providers are very rude bastards....

as for the links not working, maybee that might be solved by resetting your original webbrowser as main browser

Without asking ?

That's hardly their worst excess.

The final, never to be updated, Flash release for Linux contains a bug such that with the NVIDIA driver and hardware acceleration, the red and blue colour channels are reversed for some sites including Youtube.

Hurrah for HTML5. Sign up anywhere you see the option to:
http://www.youtube.com/html5

Yeah it's there and that's my mistake, but why does it look more like a screen print than an options list?
I suppose it wasn't intentional that it looks the way it does.

Misguidance is hardly the way to do business. Even if it is my mistake what did it get them?
And the default should clearly be OFF, based on the options nature.

"free" doesn't necessarily mean "without cost".

It's really unfortunate but it's so frequently occurring that it's the new norm so users will have to be vigilant when installing anything, which they should be anyway for other reasons.

This is exactly correct.

You just gotta be real careful, not only when setting up the initial download, but also when installing. Don't just blindly click OK to every prompt that comes up, and always choose the option to "manually install" or "install for advanced users" if it's given to you. This can sometimes allow you to keep those sorts of crapware from being installed.

Its also often described by the installer as "Quick Install" or "Custom Install", "Quick" usually takes far longer as you then have to uninstall the "shitware" that has just been installed.

I no longer even click through blindly apps that I used to and never click on the quick/standard/default install as so many programs even the best of them that have never included any "shitware" now often does.

Another thing to note. If you download a "free" app from 2 different websites, you might find that they come with different "shitware", or even that one does and one does not come with any extra shit, and websites that you have downloaded thing from before that were clean and pure may no longer be - the only thing to suggest is "extreme caution".


Andy

PS: I prefer the term "shitware" to "crapware" as it gives a stronger expression of my opinion.

There's hardly anything really "free" in the real world. Now it seems like this proven concept of getting money from people not being aware enough has entered the digital world.

Nothing really to cry about, i always tell my children to read first, think second, click third. Everyone not your family seems to want your money first and everything else second. That's how the world goes today. No surprise imho.

Of course we chould cry about it. Enduring it silently just makes it okay. If people get murdered in one part of town the solution is not to 'make sure to never go there'.

With this shitware, it can really happen to anyone. Sure, it happens to "casual users" more frequently and PC-savy users tend to get their noses in the air because of that. But with all the crap you have to click through to get some software installed, and with the increasingly unintuitive - i.e. stealthy, underhanded, fraudulant - placements of the options for the shitware, it happens to power users as well. It used to be shitware checkboxes were placed on their very own page of the installer, or at least near some other "Agree to install"-checkboxes, but now they often get buried on busy pages that look like fluff.

And some of this shitware is a bitch to get off your hard disk. I recently had to remove a "registry cleaner" from my dads PC. That thing had the mandatory uninstall .exe that Windows requires, but all that .exe did was display a message "uninstall.exe not found". Very funny. Manually trying to delete the program folder wasn't possible either, because I somehow lacked permissions. I had to boot that damned PC into safe mode and dreaded having to find a Linux boot CD had that not worked.

That shitware came bundled with Google Chrome on some shady software depot site. I always tell my dad to not install anything without my assistance, but the old man is stubborn that way.

That would have been a solution; there's less crap like this with Linux. I usually set up Linux for people with little computer skills, sometimes in a dual-boot setup with Windows.

Another thing to beware - websites that aggregate free/trial/shareware soft now usually sport their own installers. Say, you want install a generic PDF reader. You're not taken to the website's homepage, you're not starting to download the proper installation/zip package, but rather the aggregate website dishes you their own installer which then tries to force more shitware before it even lets you install the soft that you're really after. OK, to be honest I can't really say what happens after the aggregate installer is complete as I've never let it through. It's just more time wasted, more nerves eaten away for the poor folk who only wished to install some free MP3 converter or some such.