I have another rant. This time it is Adobe who has ticked me off.
I rarely use Firefox or any web browser on my windows machine. Mainly it sits there and has Windows Media Center full screen so I can watch TV. Tonight I had to use Firefox on my windows machine.
Firefox prompted for the 3.6.6 upgrade (I was still at 3.6.4). So I went ahead and installed the update. After the update, Firefox update page warned me that my Adobe Flash plugin is outdated and I should update it. I clicked that link and then the install link. The standard extension window came up and I waited the 3 seconds. I didn’t get why it was doing it via an extension, I thought this is how the update would be done. The name was Adobe download manager.
To my surprise, after FireFox restarted, it proceeded to download and install some McAfee stuff onto my machine and then failed when it tried to install the plugin update. So it failed to do what I originally wanted it to do and installed some additional stuff I didn’t even need nor want on my computer. Again, just like with Google Chrome, I was not prompted or given the chance to opt out of this.
That software only lasted about 30 seconds on the machine, I quickly went into control panel > Program and Features and removed that software. I am really annoyed yet again, software is being installed on my system. It has done one up on Google Chrome by at least telling me it is installing it. However without the option to not install it, it is forcing useless junk onto my machine.
I am not the only one with this issue, googling “Adobe firefox extension installed mcafee software” returns numerous results. I have to say to the software companies, I do not want stuff on my machine installed secretly or forcefully. I only want to install the stuff I want to install and not any 3rd party or affiliates software.
I truly should go the Apple route and remove Flash from all my systems. YouTube is already HTML5 compliant and other sites will follow for non smartphone pages. So it isn’t like I can’t live without Flash being installed on my system. Maybe I will do that.
On the last note, I removed Flash, restarted firefox, and got the missing plugin notice. I simply clicked the missing plugin notice, downloaded the Flash plugin and now flash is updated on my system. If I don’t remove Flash from my system, I am going this route from now on to install all updates.