A disturbing trend among popular freeware applications seems to be the inclusion of browser toolbar and/or other garbage options as part of the installation wizard. One rather lengthy message post has an updated list of offending programs which they have titled the “Installers Hall of Shame“.
As a developer I can certainly appreciate the hard work it takes to make a quality product and I believe they should be compensated for their work. However, if an author wants more than notoriety for their product, I believe they should charge for it as opposed to foisting a product/toolbar I doubt many of the author’s would use themselves.
While I always remove the option for included garbageware, it makes me wonder how many people have the Ask Toolbar on their system as a result of one of these installers.
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I installed an app recently (I think it was Recuva from Piriform) and it tried to force install the Dealio toolbar after I opted-out of it. The Dealio toolbar is a malware/spyware haven that chokes the browser down. I had a lot of problems with that on my old XP machine. It's a good thing I was running Windows 7 because the UAC popup stopped it dead after I told it not to install(again). I understand that they get a kick from everyone who “installs” the addon crap but to me having the stuff force install really sours the whole experince of the app itself. It's right up there with the new crappy format MSN is using for the news stories and the video player that tries to trick you so you can't mute as easily during the pre-roll ads. I liked the old video player where it just had a sidebar ad. Anyway, sorry to veer off. Good article BTW.
DOS_equis
How many Ask elements are there? Toolbar & Search I know. Any others?