The 10 most annoying programs on the Internet
The Internet has brought us many joys.
It's rewritten the rules of business and pleasure.
And pain. For it allows what may have
seemed like bright ideas at the time ('let's use it to
make sure our customers have the latest software', for
example) to turn into a stinking pit of misery —
usually, but by no means always, after marketing gets
its fangs in.
Here are just ten of the guilty
parties who try to do the impossible: to make us hate
the internet and wish it had never been invented — and
who very nearly succeed.
This gallery was written by Rupert
Goodwins.
Adobe Reader
What does Adobe Reader do? Displays PDF pages. How does
it do it? With as much bloody-minded bureaucracy, delay
and needless interaction as possible. Perhaps it's
because we humans have been spoiled by books, where the
gap between wanting to read something and reading it is
as short as the time taken to lift the cover. But
Reader's incessant updates (demanding you reset your
computer — why?), thundering great list of modules to
load, and hour-glass-provoking pauses for thought have
given Portable Document Format a reputation for being as
welcome as a flatulent camel in the kitchen.
Which is a shame, because other lightweight PDF
readers seem to manage perfectly well.
Apple
Oh, Apple. You created a domain where humans came first.
You took usability and distilled it into an art form.
Now look at you. iTunes is a music player the size of a
fat-bottomed whale that gobbles resources like krill. It
spends half its time trying to sell us stuff and the
other half trying to stop us using it. But that's not as
bad as your auto-update policy: slipping us stealth
copies of Safari under the cover of important version
updates to iTunes and Quicktime — what is this, Make
Microsoft Look Good day?
Windows Update
Your machine will reset in four minutes. Your
machine will not shut down until these five updates
are installed. You must restart your machine now.
You will install Microsoft Genuine Advantage. Please
wait while these updates are installed. Please shut
down all applications before applying this update.
Pop! New updates are ready to be installed. And now
that we've stopped you doing whatever it was you
were doing (like we care), shall we go ahead and
install them now, or would you rather be interrupted
yet again later?
We've been kind and not talked about Vista.
RealPlayer
If this software turned up at your door, you'd
call the police. RealPlayer commits just about
every sin in the book, sprinkling itself across
your desktop and offering 'Free games!'. It
installs a 'Message Center' that tells you about
microcelebrities. There is more advertising
embedded in the application than used to be on
the front page of The Times. And you just wanted
to stream The Archers.
At least Europe's been spared Real's Rhapsody
music shop. When we looked at a beta before a
subsequently abandoned UK launch, we were given
software to install. 'Disable your firewall', it
commanded. 'Drop dead', we replied.
Java
Java doesn't do anything by itself. It's a
programming language. Programming languages are like
sewage plants: if the average user becomes aware of
them, something's gone wrong.
Java doesn't know this. Java wants to be in your
face. Java wants to be updated. Java wants to tell
you the good news about Sun. Have you heard about
Sun? Here's a nice picture of our logo. And fancy a
copy of OpenOffice? No? Well, never mind. Java's
installed a copy of Yahoo Toolbar in your browser
instead. Because that's what programming languages
are there to do, right?
Yahoo
And talking of Yahoo. Please stop. Please stop
trying to take over my email, my search engine, my
home page. Please stop 'updating' your IM client to
include more emoticons, animations, noises and
whatnot — or at least have the good grace to produce
a grown-ups' edition I can use at work without
feeling like I should still be reading Smash Hits.
And yes, when I ask to exit the software, that's
because I really want to, not because I'm having a
crisis of doubt.
And there is absolutely no point in a toolbar
that just replicates all the options on your web
site's front page. Not unless you want to come
across as the sort of shrill, desperate, needy
software company that makes big noises about user
relationships but in fact knows less about its users
than the Queen does about shopping in Lidl.
Norton Antivirus
It's a little unfair to pick on Norton Antivirus and
make it carry the sins of half the desktop malware
industry — but only a little unfair. If ever a class of
software deserved to be cast into the lower reaches of
Hell and run on Satan's own desktop, it is this.
Performance- sapping, space-hogging, noisy, irritating
and prone to inducing just as many problems as they
purport to solve, these horrible, ineffective, expensive
lumps of digital thuggery keep entire platoons of
support engineers in business and home users in tears.
We know. We get the phone calls.
Preinstalled software bundles
After quarter of a century of the IBM PC, we still don't
understand why so many companies feel obliged to create
swathes of below-par software to install on the
computers they sell. Notebook makers are the worst, and
Sony the king of them all: the first job for any new
Vaio owner is to strip out the layers of desktop
'enhancements', media 'managers' and system 'control
software' that serve only to get in the way of doing
things the way you know how to do them, interfere with
other software packages and suck up such enormous
amounts of resources on start-up that two weeks after
you've bought one, you're still not sure whether it's
broken or not.
Outlook/Exchange
Free, web-based email systems have more storage than
you can use. They have powerful, accurate, swift
search systems. They have clean interfaces, with
threaded conversations and sane attachment
management.
Then there's Microsoft's Outlook. Things have
been getting better for those whose corporate
upgrade strategy allows it, but with major updates
happening every four years or so that's a long time
to be looking at a non-threaded, licence-restricted
storage- squeezed, treacle-slow-searching email
system. Especially while the online services get
better and better, and doubly so now that email is
the single most important business application ever
created.
Flash
There's nothing wrong with Flash, provided you
don't use it to construct web sites where people
want to find information, navigate easily or do
anything beyond passively consume exactly what
you choose to give them in exactly the way
you've decided. There's also nothing wrong with
using it for a splendid splash screen replete
with movies, sound and animation — if you don't
mind frustrating, annoying and possibly even
driving away people who might, just might, have
something better to do.
In fact, Flash-based web sites are quite
possibly one of the most useful pieces of
network technology around. Like heroin or
microlights, they ensure that those who think
it's a good idea aren't around to annoy us for
too long.
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