Bloatware rant

Post Reply New Topic

Why is it that every time a good piece of software is released, it has to be turned into a bloated POS?

I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 because they supposedly fixed some memory leaks and made it use less overall. Yeah, right. It uses at least as much RAM as before, despite the fact that I'm no longer running a few plugins that no longer work with 1.5. On one hand it was stupid of them to not allow for backwards compatibility, but then again I shudder to think of how much more of a pig it would be with it. Right now I have 4 tabs open, and it's using 90 megs. WTF?! How can you use that much RAM by simply displaying 4 small web pages?

I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to be going the way of Winamp, RealPlayer, and Acrobat Reader. All started out great and quickly became successful because they did one thing, and did it well. Then they started kicking new versions out the door with more and more useless features until they became buggy, slow pieces of crap that are bloated to the point of being essentially useless. Adobe Reader especially pisses me off. Every freaking time I open a PDF it expects me to install an update that probably either adds some pointless new feature or fixes a security hole created by a previous one, then wait 15 minutes for it to reload.

I wish software developers would stop pulling this crap. If car companies were the same way, the Mazda Miata would be a cruise ship by now.

Heh.. After typing this it brought back memories of a very similar rant when Windows 95 came out- that memory hog needed a whopping EIGHT MEGS to run decently! Hell, my DVD player probably has more than that now.

I was just thinking this myself -- Firefox 1.5 is a ridiculous resource-hog. There'll always be old versions, though. I went right back to 1.0.7 after trying out 1.5, and I don't expect to update any time soon.

Winamp isn't so bad if you use a classic skin; the modern skins are monstrosities. But Acrobat? Don't even get me started on Acrobat...

This is all so horribly true.

My first PC had 1mb ram, a 170mb hard disk and a 66mhz CPU in 1994. It wasn't exactly top of the range, even then.

However, I could program, play games, write word documents and surf the web just as well as I can now with a 1024mb ram, 120gb hard disk and 2.8ghz CPU that I use now.

Sure, there's a few nice little features that have crept in and everything is a lot prettier, but the basic functionality remains the same.

I'd like to get a top spec PC from today and install Windows 3.1 and all the software from that time. Apart from the odd little thing, I bet I could do everything meaningful that I do now, but much faster. With how I used PCs 10 years ago, the idea of filling a 120gb hard disk would be unimaginable. Now it seems barely big enough!
Trouble is, the hardware is probably incompatible and it'll be impossible to track down all the software from that era...

What we do with software these days reminds me of those farmers you often see who clutter their land with old machinary, caravans, cars, tyres and general junk. They've got so much space to play that they don't bother to tidy it up and make better use of it. People who live in flats certainly don't keep piles of used tyres or other worthless junk wasting space!
And that's how it is with software. In the old days we all lived in flats (16 bit computing), now we've moved to mansions (32/64 bit), we've stopped bothering to throw out the rubbish and we fill the place with worthless crap, just because we can.

For instance, my browser (Firefox 1.5 RC3) has a "block pop-up window" option. If the browsers had never been able to do pop-up bloody windows then we wouldn't need to block them would we? We've introduced some crap and now have to make the software even more bloated to deal with the bloat we added originally!

I am reminded of the ever expanding waist lines of we, in the Western world. Bloatware is the digital cousin of the same problem.
When will low-fat software be available?

Even Linux, which used to come on 1 CD now comes on a whole damn set of the things! Aarrggh!

Although it isn't open source, Opera is (IMHO) technically superior to Firefox and is a lot less demanding of resources. It's also free (as in beer) now.

If you're interested in an operating system with a non-bloat philosophy then you might want to check out OpenBSD; the base install is 160MB.

I have stuck Windows 95 on a 2.4ghz machine before. Um I don't really think you could get any thing to run faster. Every thing was instant.

I'm a mac user so I really like Safari and Camino, but I also use firefox for wrongplanet web development testing since more than 35% of WP members use firefox.

Also, some web applications don't work in Safari (like Google Analytics) and I use firefox for that. Firefox does seem to be a resource hog and I can't afford that with only 512MB ram. At least it isn't a Java application though. Java applications tend to be the biggest memory hogs of all. Think about azureus.

Java needs to go away. Sadly, IE and Firefox are the same speed on my PC...meh. Adobe should just stop existing, makes everything go crazy. I hope Firefox isn't becoming bloatware, I might have to switch to something else.

This really irks me, too, but I've learned to put up with it, mostly because sticking with legacy software ends up causing me just as many headaches. I do try to find the smallest, most resource-efficient software for any particular job, though. Firefox has always eaten memory for me, on FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows, 0.9-1.5, but it's better than anything else I've found (Opera excluded; I need some extensions, so I can't use it).

The absolute worst case of bloatware I've ever seen, though, was a driver for an HP Photosmart 8200. The MINIMAL install was 200MiB; normal install was 600 MiB. Furthermore, I work in a corporate environment and we only allow certain executables to run - there were 170+ in the install directory and at least 4 that were automatically started. I ended up just blocking the system tray icons from launching because they'd try to launch other executables that I couldn't lcoate and result in errors - the printer worked fine anyway. It's simply unfathomable to me that I'm forced to install such a large amount of unnecessary software just to get the printer driver installed.

Used to leave one tab on Google News. Stopped that when *something* on the Google News site caused a hellacious memory leak, ate my 1 GB of RAM and 700 MB of swap in about 4 hours.

Unfortunately, there are not a lot of other choices in Linux - Mozilla is even more bloated, and Konquerer is useless for hitting anything that's not coded properly.

I like a lot about Firefox - but it needs to go on a damn diet.