The Most Annoying Software Out There 885
superglaze writes "ZDNet UK has a very entertaining round-up of the most annoying software out there, and everything from RealPlayer and Adobe Reader to Java and Norton Antivirus gets a kicking. '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.'"
Norton Products... (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst has to be the Norton XXXX products. I installed Norton 360 v2 on my laptop as an "upgrade" to Norton AntiVirus 2007, and I think that intentionally installing a few viruses and malware would have resulted in better overall system performance.
Symantec tech support was, of course, useless:
"Sir, you have a virus or malware."
"Yes, I know: the malware is called Norton 360 since my problems didn't appear until I installed your product. What I want to know is how to stop Norton 360 from using 100% of both cores and incessently accessing the DVD drive for no apparent reason."
"Sir, you need to run a scan for virus and malware."
At least I got the damn thing uninstalled and got a refund. Never again...
Re:Winamp becoming Damned Irritating (Score:2, Insightful)
Please let Apple software update be on there... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
Update apps... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no question that your system should be aware of what software is installed, and what the latest version is, and make the user aware too and give them the option to install the updates.
On linux you rarely, if ever, get problems like this because the updates are handled centrally.
The problem with windows and osx, is that there is no central way for third party apps to register to the automatic update mechanism, the supplied update functions are only for the original vendor's apps, not third parties, meaning every third party has their own update service wasting memory and informing/annoying you in different ways.
The linux approach is orders of magnitude better, centralised package repositories, a centralised method of informing the user, you can choose how to be informed of updates, and you won't be hassle any other way. To further help matters, the package manager knows of packages you don't have installed too, giving you single click access to the latest versions of a whole host of additional applications.
Re:Honestly, these problems are solveable (Score:4, Insightful)
Software annoys becuse ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The computer magazines whose job it is to educate the consumers and judge software are compromised by the conflict of interest. They depend on the ads from the very same software companies to survive.
ARGHSFARGH! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Honestly, these problems are solveable (Score:5, Insightful)
For Linux, Agreed. But when is Evince going to work in Windows ? Oh. Never ?? So what choice does a person using windows have ?
For Linux, Agreed. But when is Amarok going to work in Windows or with people's iPods? Oh. Never ?? So what alternateive choice does a person using windows have ?
No repeated system restarts, but none ? What about when your kernel is updated ? What about VMWare needing to be recompiled once you HAVE rebooted ?
See above comments for Amarok.
True. However if you do filesharing with Windows, you should consider something like Avast which has a free Windows AND Linux version.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:5, Insightful)
You should try to remove Norton virus checker. It has pieces of itself everywhere, and it over writes Windows system files with its own.
So you get a brand new machine, and during the first login, the Norton installer runs. You have NO choice in this. Some deal was reached between the machine distributor and Norton, and that is just the way it is.
If you make a mistake, the entire Windows system goes sideways. We alway do an image FIRST, then try to remove it. That way if something blows up you have a fallback. Then we make an image for the rest of the same type of machine, and we re-image every new one that comes in the door.
Hey Norton: go stuff it!
Left out Top Ten Slideshows (Score:5, Insightful)
What about "top ten slideshows" on big media websites that present their "top ten" on eleven or twelve separate pages, each filled with more ads and other distractions than the actual "content" you've been directed to via Slashdot?
Yeah, I know they're not "applications" but, the annoyance factor is right up there.
Re:Honestly, these problems are solveable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did they mention linux firefox? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Norton Products... (Score:2, Insightful)
I concur (Score:4, Insightful)
They should have included themselves on the bloody list.
Re:Norton Products... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:5, Insightful)
so-so (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple Update - I don't have a beef with that.
Windos Update - is a study on how not to do it. It'll pop up even if you're running a fullscreen application at that time, some of which don't handle that gracefully. It'll tell you every few minutes that it wants to reboot, no matter how often you tell it to go stand in the corner. Really annoying freak.
Norton - yeah, if you've not already replaced it with any of the free and better alternatives, then you deserve the pain.
Sony crap - oh yes. They even forgot to mention that nothing in the docs tells you what does what, so you're left guessing as to which of these might be, you know, important driver packages, and which are just crap they added because someone in marketing thought it's a nifty idea.
Outlook - YES, FINALLY! Outlook is one of those things where I'm all for the death penalty. Outlook is the worst disaster for corporate productivity this side of the galactic core. It's also the worst e-mail client I've ever used, and that's a fairly long list. Outlook is enterprise messaging gone horribly wrong, in more ways than you thought possible. I'm SOO glad they put it on the list.
Flash - I find that one a bit unfair. Flash can be a cool tool, but it's often abused in ways that would be illegal if it were a human being. I'm not sure Adobe alone is to blame for that.
Re:Update apps... (Score:3, Insightful)
If your update process requires a separate executable running constantly in the background, you're doing it wrong. If your update process requires anything from the user other than clicking "Ok" and waiting no more than a few seconds, you're doing it wrong. Despite Firefox 2 having updated itself 13 times, I have not once been annoyed by it.
Re:Winamp becoming Damned Irritating (Score:4, Insightful)
WinAmp 2.95 was perfect. Small, wicked fast, just about perfect.
WinAmp 3 was an unnecessary rewrite, and I didn't like it much. Felt slower for no real benefit to me. It was about this time I went over to iTunes (mostly due to iPod).
Then they later released 5 because of all the complaints. 2 (the good version) + 3 (the recent version) = 5 (the new version). Never tried it, WinAmp had lost all mindshare by that point.
So much good software just bloats past what it needed and into death. Reader used to be pretty good. Norton wasn't the amazingly bad program it is now, it was once the best.
Re:My vote: HP (Score:3, Insightful)
How about the 50 MB (seriously) driver to run this printer. I thought, "what could possibly be in that thing?"
Well, how about a pretty crappy photo manager, a pretty crappy scanning utility, etc., then it wants to run all the time and have stuff blinking on my desktop (along with all those other programs blinking on my desktop--if I actually let all the programs do this my monitor would look like the circus is in town and I wouldn't have any space left to see anything).
So I thought I'd finish off with a bit of useful advice--I thought I had found a driver on HP's page for just the printer driver and that's it weighing in at about 13 MB with no annoying crap. Turns out, however, that I'm either dreaming or it's gone--the three driver options for my printer are 50 MB, 250 MB, or 365 MB! Something tells me a printer driver does not need to be 50 MB, let alone 365. And whatever programs make of that other 300 MB must be written pretty bad to take up that much space.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope I'm not the only one struck by the irony of this article formatting given that this it is criticizing bad UI design...
Yup, HP has lost the plot (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried to get an HP A3 inkjet going the other day, using an old P4 box as the print server.
I do not consider 100% CPU utilisation while trying to print a PDF to be acceptable, nor do I consider that having to reboot to clear a stuck job is a good idea. And this from a driver of nearly 100MBytes.
There are several other recent HP gripes that are causing me nowadays no longer to recommend HP printers. I guess it will take many years to recover from Fiorina.
Re:Norton Products... (Score:3, Insightful)
AntiVir Free
AntiVir Free
AntiVir Free
I find that helps too.
Flash! Aaaaaaa! (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash is too often used for creating website navigation widgets, or worse yet, for encapsulating entire websites. And even worse than that are the horribly annoying Flash version-checker scripts, which demand that you will install or upgrade Flash before viewing this site, because "I spent fifteen minutes on those fancy Flash-based site nav buttons, and you damn well better look at them" even though virtually all of the site's actual content is in plain HTML.
What's more, I don't need or want a Flash widget to view a series of JPEGs. Just show me the damn images - I'm perfectly capable of clicking by myself to move on to the next one, thanks.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Honestly, these problems are solveable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Honestly, these problems are solveable (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but why would you want to? It defaults to Magnatune, which has a much nicer business model than iTunes. No DRM, more formats including patent-free Ogg Vorbis, artists gets half of what you pay instead of only 10% or less, you pay whatever you think is reasonable, and you're allowed, nay, encouraged to share. I think you can also get other music stores like Jamendo for Amarok, but I personally use Gnome's Rhythmbox, which has plugins by default for both of these stores. Sure, you won't find Britney Spears selling her stuff in Magnatune, but the quality of the music is not bad at all, even if it's not what's currently playinig in MTV.
Personally, iTunes was the biggest reason why I installed Debian etch on my mom's laptop. She doesn't know her own root password, of course; I'm the one adminning it for her. A bit of a hassle for me to set up at first, but now it works fine, and it has the rock solid stability of Debian. She loves it, and in her own words, "a lot less bullshitty than that other thing." She doesn't know the other thing is called Sony Vaio's default Windows XP install with all that crapware it comes with out of the box.
Re:Norton Products... (Score:1, Insightful)
Unless you're a (Score:1, Insightful)
RealPlayer, totally. Quicktime, HP runner-up (Score:3, Insightful)
The software you get when you install an HP AIO is mindbogglingly irritating, and has been buggy (the same bugs) for years. Not only does the user interface suck donkey sphincter, but it the "suite" spawns zillions of little processes, which hang and die. Again, W.T.F.
And the lame standard Quicktime. Why does Apple think anyone would pay for the ability to play in full screen? Are you kidding me? Annoyware all the way.
But, you know, that's really just scratching the surface.
Meanwhile, Flash, properly used, is great. I'm not sure why people continue hating on Flash. I do use FlashBlock to shut those irritating ads the hell up though.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you're doing it wrong??
Re:Honestly, these problems are solveable (Score:2, Insightful)
Because I don't buy music based on business models and politics. Magnatune does offer some compelling music though.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:5, Insightful)
What irritates me is why the hell do they have an uninstaller if it, you know, doesn't uninstall the damn thing? I suppose if they're going to put removal tools for viruses on their site they may as well include one for their own "products".
The only people who write worse (un)installers than Symantec is Adobe. I truly think they have nothing but brain-dead chimps on their install team.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:5, Insightful)
Quickbooks Pro 2007 (Score:2, Insightful)
I have too many complaints/irritations with the thing to list here, but their "pay $200/year for tax tables" formula is a scam. I found all I needed to know online @ the IRS and set up a tax liabilities calculator in a OOo Calc spreadsheet just so I didn't have to boot to windows.
OK, one more ... As we all know, WinXP, and all other flavors of Win, melt down occasionally requiring a reinstall. A recent reinstall of XP and QB, then requests to register it with home base. This time it could not do the registration without a phone call to customer support. I got Lam in Pakistan. His english was poor. Rather than whupping out validation code to unlock the program, I got 50 questions. Then the guy started a sales pitch to sell me some crap I didn't want or need.
QB has given more irritation than anything positive.
My solution to this is to give GnuCash another go. So far it's looking very promising. Me thinks I'll start contributing to the GnuCash project to enable employee tracking and payroll, and anything else it needs to meet the needs of SOHO.
Re:My vote: HP (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I really really hate this. When will printer manufacturers learn that I don't want to install your stupid little utilities?!
Give me plain, unadulterated drivers, not software installs. Give me a PPD/INF/whatever that I can point my OS to and use all of the built-in OS printing functions. That's all I want.
Same with cameras, scanners, and pretty much any other hardware out there. Give me the driver and leave me alone.
Re:It's for multisession CD-R. (Score:5, Insightful)
The program doesn't know that.
People were used to dragging files on and off a 1.4 MiB floppy disk. As the floppy began to disappear around the time of Windows 98 and the iMac, floppy formats from Iomega and Imation with nearly a hundred times the capacity enjoyed some limited success because the file manager treated them just like floppies. Some CD mastering apps tried to emulate floppy use cases by loading the existing sessions off a CD, mapping a temporary folder that imported the previous sessions, and writing the changes to a .iso and then to the CD once the user started to eject the CD.
But in the ISO 9660 format, the starting sector number of each file depends on the number of sectors in previous sessions, so building an image can't happen until the mastering program knows how large the previous sessions are. And because the mastering application doesn't know that your CDs are straight from the shrinkwrap until it reads the disc, it doesn't build the image until then. Sure, they could have put in a checkbox to turn multisession recording on and off, but that would not have increased hardware sales or software license revenue compared to the increased support costs from inexperienced users who mistakenly uncheck that box and try to add a session.
Re:My vote: The Browser (Score:3, Insightful)
What browser is written in PHP? (Note: "browser" and "server" are two separate pieces of software. To lift a line from the original article, the server is like a sewage treatment plant - the average user should only notice it when something goes wrong. Unfortunately, we live in a world where your sewer line backs up several times a day. :-))
Yes, just as desktop publishing software enabled what Henry Spencer called "ransom-note typography", the Web has enabled the construction of huge numbers of crappily-designed Web sites (many of which are enabled by a not-quite-so-great plugin - one of the pieces of software mentioned in the original article, with a name that begins with the letter grade you'd like to give to a lot of the designers who use it, namely the grade for "fail", and ends with a verb describing what you'd like to do to said designers with a whip).
Most browsers don't. Did you mean "Web page editor" when you said "browser"?
Yes, such a disaster that most businesses and government organizations haven't bothered going online, and nobody's come up with any mechanism for searching the contents of Web sites.
The Web might be a disaster, but I, at least, still find it more convenient than the "lack of a Web" that we had before.
Re:M$ Word (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Norton Products... (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF does everyone in the world and their brother want to install a toolbar in my web browser? If I said yes to all of them, I'd have about 2 pixels of viewpane left to look at.
Re:Make Microsoft Look Good day? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:5, Insightful)
(For that matter, why were people using Realplayer?)
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:5, Insightful)
Quicktime - It's both a terrible media player and it is insanely unwilling to be removed. Apple's central design concept seems to be preventing the user from doing what he wants. If I delete qttask.exe, it means I don't want that file anymore, not that I want it to be resurrected. If I disable it in msconfig, it doesn't mean that the next time Quicktime runs I want it to get a new startup entry.
iTunes - ituneshelper.exe is about the same as qttask, and iTunes is even worse at playing music than Quicktime is at playing movies. It's the single most bloated piece of software I've ever used. The iTunes store is another reason to avoid it, not to use it. It also crashes way too much on a new MacBook Pro, and since I don't know what Apple compatible software is a good replacement for it, I can't just replace it for my friend as I would if he had Windows.
Apple Updater - Everyone I know just installed Safari. They didn't mean to.
Flash - Thank you, Flashblock, for making the internet useable again. Thank you, bad web designers, for sticking retarded flash "intro pages" on your sites so I can see that they've been blocked and then avoid your company on principal.
HP Printer Philosophy - Thanks to you, too, HP, for making a printer that needs an IP to be set via a web interface in order to access that same web interface. Thanks to my neighbor for having a parallel cable sitting around so I could access it in a more traditional way.
Windows Desktop - Why do you lose my icon placement every time your resolution changes? Luckily, there are countless little freeware apps to save icon positions.
Real Player - You basically invented the Apple "if you uninstall me but I will grow more powerful than you can possibly imagine" routine, so you get extra evil points for originality.
Logitech Mouse Drivers - My mouse drivers are now 100 megs. Finally they fixed the two year problem of needing to run them manually after booting (running on startup caused them to fail), but they still involve two separate taskbar icons and take up a ton of RAM.
Word - I know how to make you do what I want, but it took years to learn how to both stop your autoformatting and then put in the formatting I want. I hate the way you place images. I hate the way you resize my stuff after I've already locked it down.
Verizon Phone UI - My phone had a great UI and lots of nice capabilities when it was made. You removed bluetooth file transfers so I'd have to pay you to get photos off my phone, and you made the interface ugly. You removed the ability to vibrate and ring at the same time. I'm glad my phone was so easily hackable.
Flash (again, but bear with me) movie players - The only reason you exist is to keep me from saving video to my hard disk. Guess what. I can still do it. Meanwhile, you're slow, often not resizable without using a magnifying tool to manually zoom onto your little box, and you require me to enable flash.
I know how to fix or replace all of you, but you kill me every time I have to use a new PC and wade through your bloated code again.
Re:Honestly, these problems are solveable (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a workaround.
But one that works exceptionally well.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:4, Insightful)
It will pass the generic:
if(!exists(qttray.exe))
{
}
check but when it tries to execute it it just fails silently.
More on point, though: By deleting the file (or doing this little hack I proposed) you're still "changing your usage." It would be easier to just disable it in msconfig.
Of course, even that is fallible: Next time the app updates itself it'll be re-enabled.
Re:Norton Products... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't run it on my primary machine precisely because it is so intrusive and demanding when the machine turns on. It is used on my secondary machine and the machines of two of my friends, all of which have decent specs. With these, you might as well wander off when you boot up, because anything that you try to do will be so incredibly slow that it really isn't worth the effort. As far as I can tell, the program works fine otherwise, but it has a horrible UI.
Bonzi Buddy is the MOST ANNOYING EVER!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Lotus Notes (Score:2, Insightful)
Some software I hate (Score:2, Insightful)
Any software that doesn't use sane version numbering that anyone could tell what the newest version is easily. Norton and Microsoft I'm looking at you.
Software that wants to update when it is started or seemingly randomly while I'm working. I'm not in maintenance mode, so I'm not updating software. Shut up and go away. Or if you're already set to auto update, don't tell me, don't interrupt my work and don't freaking reboot my computer!
Software that steals focus. This is just about everything. My favorite X11 window manager ever is Window Maker and it has an option to never allow new windows to take focus. I want that option on Vista, since I need to use Windows for work.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:3, Insightful)
SEE THAT CLIPPY, I'M TRYING TO KILL YOU! CAN YOU HELP ME WITH *THAT*, MOTHERFUCKER?!?!
Re:ANY Enterprise AntiVirus (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, the damned thing isn't your property. It's your employer's, so it's not yours to fuck with.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:1, Insightful)
Excel (Score:3, Insightful)
It's annoying feature is that it will try to guess what format the data is in and the annoying part is that it will get it right about 90% of the time, which is just good enough that the user thinks it is the best thing since sliced bread, but anyone who tries to write data handling import routines from Excel (I'm using
IIRC some Genetic engineers were entering strings like "10FEB" or whatever which were all converted to dates.
I just want a prominent checkbox somewhere which says "don't fuck with my data", but so far they haven't put one in.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bonzi Buddy is the MOST ANNOYING EVER!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Bonzi buddy is the most annoying ever...
"The Purple Monkey is not your friend..." (thanks Melissa
Re:Make Microsoft Look Good day? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember recently here someone telling me how Apple just works, and insisting that my PC would always distract me, or be "noisy" (I'm not quite sure what he meant), giving examples such as watching a DVD. Needless to say, he didn't believe me when I told him my PC just worked too (and does more than simply working).
But funnily enough, the next day I did have distractions when trying to view a video - because it was a quicktime movie, and I couldn't get it to do basic functionality, such as full screen mode. So I have to concede he was right after all - my computer doesn't just work, when it's running Apple software at least.
Re:Print Version (and my Apple woes) (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not just use Quicktime Alternative & never have to bother with Quicktime's arrogance / spamminess / attempts to install other software / irritating update / etc?