What a pointless ‘auto updater’

Another morning, another Adobe Flash update.

Big ass dialog telling me that I have an update which links me to their website where I have to uncheck the dumb-ass add-on options for (depending on the week) McAfee and the Google toolbar.

Several months ago Adobe were pushing/advertising their auto-updating technology. They were pretty much saying ‘completely automated updates‘. To me it seems more like manual updating. You’re wasting my time with the prompts, the dialogs, the small download which subsequently downloads the update (each one is tied to the version of flash you’re downloading so what’s the damned point in having a stub downloader for each version).

If you want to see a proper auto-updater you should look to google. It downloads updates silently in the background, applies them (as much as possible) in the background and if you need to restart your browser it mentions this in a prompt. The downloads are tiny, caused by their use of their differential compression algorithm which keeps the updates small to the point of being downloadable in the background while not interfering with your normal use of the system. At the same time they’re not pushing a bunch of extra third-party software on you.