Google Bundles Toolbar With Adobe Apps 157
grammar fascist writes "Sci-Tech Today reports that Google is paying a 'significant amount' to bundle Google Toolbar with certain Adobe downloads. From the article: 'The initial venue for the Google mini-app will be downloads of the popular and free Shockwave multimedia player. The move is seen by some observers as an effort to outflank Microsoft, especially as Internet Explorer 7 nears its formal launch this summer [...] Interestingly, Google's search toolbar will be available only when Shockwave is downloaded for use with Internet Explorer on Windows.'"
Google crazyness.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Google crazyness.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google crazyness.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Google crazyness.. (Score:4, Informative)
Are you sure it was google desktop responsible for all those ads or perhaps it was all the p0rn sites visited with IE.
Pretty sure. Turns out it is a feature called "Alerts", which there is no mention of in the normal Preferences, or the documentation for Google Desktop, but if you enable the Desktop Sidebar and look in the menu for that, there is an extra item "Customize Alerts...", where you can disable them. Since I never use the sidebar, I had no idea this feature existed, I guess it got turned on by the IE Google Toolbar since it lay dormant until I fired up IE for the first time.
As for the mods that modded you +1 Informative, rather than Funny, and my original post -1 Troll, you need to stop smoking the Google crack guys.
Re:Google crazyness.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I use Google for searches and for unimportant email, but I know the company is not my friend, as they would like me to believe. But I won't use other Google software that has to much access to my computer without necessarily telling me everything it is doing. And I won't run IE except in very rare circumstance when Firefox or Opera can't load a page I really ned to get to. I suspect Google will sell-out a lot of security or usability for ad revenue.
Re:Google crazyness.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Google crazyness.. (Score:3, Informative)
As for the firewall thing, did you enable Search Across Computers by any chance? Did you read the linked to privacy policy explaining what the feature does?
Re:Google crazyness.. (Score:3, Informative)
[Redacted] Space for sale! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:[Redacted] Space for sale! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:[Redacted] Space for sale! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:[Redacted] Space for sale! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Google crazyness.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm all for it (Score:3, Informative)
web -1.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
Now we have a new kind of WWW applications. It's applications that use the web browser as their GUI platform and run in the web browser. Such applications are, advanced word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail readers and eventually the Browser In The Browser secret project google's been working on. These applications have NOTHING to do with the concept of the WEB.
It is "scripts" for the IE/Mozilla program, like java programs for the JVM, C# programs for
But for the users, the IE/Mozilla platform is the most insecure way to run their applications. Their application is constantly connected to the internet. Both browsers have numerous vunerabilities and new ones are discovered every day. The application downloads and "runs" new data, very often without the user knowing about it (through hidden javascript links and the flash player). The user cannot trace, debug or even study the AJAX code that runs on their IE/Mozilla platform. Through asynchronous javascript and flash, binary proprietary code runs on their PC with full priviledges. And to all these add that javascript is a terrible programming language and that the GUI in the browser was designed for forms and was never good for things like an interactive text shell. \paragraph
The result is that you get poor applications, that are slow, very insecure, do things without the user's control and it's a Mozilla/IE lockin.
That is Web -1.0
Re:web -1.0 (Score:2)
The result is that you get poor applications, that are slow, very insecure, do things without the user's control and it's a Mozilla/IE lockin.
Right, because it's so much slower for me to middle-click "Writely" in my favorites bar and have it pop up in a new tab, than to fire up the gargantuan Microsoft Word (or in my case at home, iWork Pages).
Oh and because there's absolutely NO value added by having my data accessible and editable from anywhere, using any modern browser. And there's clearly no worth i
Alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
Google are inconveniencing everyone through this. Acrobat Reader is already a 20MB download for reasons I can't imagine. Why bloat Shockwave in the same way?
Re:Alternatives (Score:2, Informative)
I don't understand why people bother with AR anymore. Other PDF viewers like FoxIt Reader [foxitsoftware.com] manage to do nostly the same in less than 1MB.
Re:Alternatives (Score:3, Interesting)
Does FoxIt have a search feature that'll go through entire folders and search those documents at the same time? I use this frequently...
Re:Alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Alternatives (Score:2)
I was asking out of personal interest, not out of some desire to shoot it down. I hope the developers don't share your attitude, though. It's not like it's a super hard feature to write.
Re:Alternatives (Score:2)
Re:Alternatives (Score:1)
I use FoxItReader [foxitsoftware.com]. It's super fast, the download is less than 1 meg. The only downside I've found is that it only works with Windows.
Re:Alternatives (Score:2)
I found one more downside: I can't zoom the contents of a rectangle which I drag with the mouse. When working with A0 PDF drawings, this is almost a "need to have" feature.
(And I will have to learn some new keyboard shortcuts.)
But apart from that, it
Re:Alternatives (Score:2)
It's nice, but you still have to have a copy of Acrobat Reader around too.
Re:Alternatives (Score:2)
When I first read this article I thought, "God I hate bundled software!" But then I relized that I haven't installed Flash for IE on Windows in like 8 years. I guess I really don't care about this instance. Now if they struck a deal with Redhat or the Debian Foundation or something...
of course targets only IE (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course it targets only IE. If somebody is smart enough to not use IE, then surely he is smart enough to not use msn search or any other crap. He might even conciously choose to not use google, but others!
as an example my search toolbar includes:
http://www.google.com/search?s [google.com]
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=s&meta=site3Dgr
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=s [google.com]
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&c2
http://packages.debian.org/ [debian.org]
http://ask.com/ [ask.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?searc
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/search/index.cgi?q=s [wolfram.com]
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=s [m-w.com]
http://freshmeat.net/search?q=s [freshmeat.net]
Re:of course targets only IE (Score:2)
Re:of course targets only IE (Score:2)
Re:of course targets only IE (Score:2)
www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&c2c%20off = 1&q=define:%s&btnG=Search
groups.google.com/groups?q=%s&meta=site%3Dgroups
groups.google.com/groups?selm=%s
images.google.com/images?q=%s
packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?key words=%s&searchon=names&subword=1&version=all&rele ase=all
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go= Go
mathworld.wolfram.com/search/index.cgi?q=%s
encyklopedia.pwn.pl/szukaj.php?co=%s
www.
Already happening, really (Score:4, Interesting)
this hurts ADBE more than it helps Google (Score:4, Insightful)
The road to evil is paved with selling out (Score:2)
When an organization reaches a certain market share or amount of power, it reaches a sort of tipping point into arrogance, hubris and control-freakery, manifested in increasing its efforts to exploit all the other parties it deals with to the maximum degree. Microsoft and the **AA are long since way on the far side of that point; similarly on a larger scale the USA in the international arena; and now on a small scale, Adobe.
Last weekend I was collecting installers in preparation to reinstall Windows and w
Re:Standalone Installer (Score:2, Interesting)
as opposed to the download manager one.
*does a little test*
Aha! Javascript is the culprit.
If you enter adobe's site with javascript disabled enabled,
they give you access to the standalone installer.
I used NoScript in Firefox 1.5.
current link in case you cannot replicate this:
http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/7 x/7.0.8/enu/AdbeRdr708_en_US.exe
Since I already had this version installed I had to
uninstall acrobat reader to test whethe
Re:Standalone Installer (Score:2)
From a practical point of view it's good that these things are fixable. However, the obnoxious presumption of Adobe's settings remains offensive and lowers my opinion of the company.
I think the big picture here is that Adobe has about reached the point of diminishing returns when it comes to enticing people with better products - Photoshop for example, is about the best it can be, or at least improvements won't be as dramatic now, and similarly with other products. So the company
Obnoxious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obnoxious (Score:5, Insightful)
I was disappointed there were so many.
Google Toolbar is a good program for those who use IE (I think it's totally unnecessary for Mozilla) but Google or not, bundled software is just obnoxious. It's sad to see Google going down this road. If I want to install Google Toolbar, I will go to google's website and download and install it. If I go to the shockwave download site, then I only want shockwave.
Google's contributing to the problem a lot of people have, where they have too many programs installed on their systems they never wanted. Too many programs installed even, that they don't even know are there.
Re:Obnoxious (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to agree, this is a step too far as far as bundling goes- the Shockwave player is supposed to be as small a download as possible in order to lower the barrier to installation. Someone with a DSL connection may not mind the extra few seconds of download time, but someone with a shockwave download they're waiting on so they can use a site on their modem may get pissed off and not view the site at all.
Basically it adds to the payload of the plugin and makes it harder to use shockwave on your
Re:Obnoxious (Score:4, Informative)
Also, what other brilliant solution do you have for delivering multimedia over the web? Javascript? Realplayer? Windows media player? Give me a fuckin' break.
Actually the closest thing to it is Quicktime, but then that requires embedded flash elements for interactivity.
*sits back and watches his karma funeral pyre*
Re:Obnoxious (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Obnoxious (Score:2)
*looks to sky, shaking fist*
Damn you, advertisers; damn you all to hell!
Re:Obnoxious (Score:1)
Its not just obonxious, its adding an software that we cant use to an otherwise useful program. Extra toolbars from Google, Yahoo, or anyone else for that matter are a violation of the security policy where I work. This means that I have to start figuring out how to remove them from the system or worse, stop using their programs. Its
Re:Obnoxious (Score:2)
As an administrator, you can probably work out how to uncheck the option to install it.
Re:Obnoxious (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as there is profit in bundling software, there will be bundling of software. In fact, the revenue from bundling is considerably more substantial and stable than the revenues from users. You don't think Adobe is offering this bundling to Google for free do you?!?!
B.
Re:Obnoxious (Score:3, Insightful)
Why I am reading story and comments? For my entertainment...
Some people were really bugged by Adobe displaying tiny banners in their "Reader", a thing which they give freely. It was plugging into MS Office or something. As this is Google, nobody gets bugged by a "toolbar" (seen its privacy policy?!) coming with Adobe applications and even d
Re:Obnoxious (Score:1)
Apple isn't much better with their "bundling" of software. In order to install iTunes in Windows, you are forced to install Quicktime aswell. Supposedely because iTunes uses Quicktime to play songs?!. They could have just included a quicktime dll in iTunes if iTunes really did use some quicktime technology to play mp3s. But instead, they
Re:Obnoxious (Score:2)
Quicktime Player.exe , that thing is just a small wrapper. iTunes is entirely quicktime.
The "tray" application? Blame the coder of OS it works in. As long as they compete in mafia ways by stealing extensions from programs, both Apple and Realnetworks will have those "lets see if windows media player stole my
Re:Obnoxious (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obnoxious (Score:2)
It's only good if you turn off all the spyware features that send every URL you visit to an advertising company's profiling servers. (The advertising company is Google, BTW.)
Re:Obnoxious (Score:1)
By Default is it on or off? (Score:2)
Believe it or not, not everyone knows all of the software available to them at any given time. As such, advertising like this (which is essentially what bundling software is, advertising for the bundled program) does have a useful purpose. If someone offers me a program, I like the look of it and I install it and enjoy it, then I am thankful for whoever offere
Re:Obnoxious (Score:2)
Yahoo toolbar is a menace to society. I stopped using anything related to Yahoo simply for fear of that monster being installed. It's a annoying, hard to get rid of and generally useless.
Google's toolbar, however, is one I actually choose to install. It lets you reconfigure it to hide whatever you don't want to see, many of the options are useful and certain things like the spell check are
Bad Google Bad Dog (Score:2)
Re:Obnoxious (Score:2)
Besides, if I read correctly, this applies only to IE users. Well, if someone is still using IE, I bet he will have to deal with far more many bad things than google toolbar. An extra search box won't make hell of difference.
Re:Obnoxious (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Obnoxious (Score:2)
Thanks, but no thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thanks, but no thanks (Score:2)
I've already started to give them the message by uninstalling Adobe reader and installing the FoxIt PDF Reader [foxitsoftware.com]. It's a small download, doesn't come bundled with anything, doesn't ask you to update EVERY time you open it, and has no splash screen. It just opens a PDF and displays it - really, really
I'm holding my breath... (Score:3, Interesting)
Business necesity (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
We already have a *pretty* good free OS in the form of Linux, we already have *pretty* good apps for it. Why settle for Google or MSN Search or Yahoo search or whatever? I should think that a massively distributed OS search engine should do pretty well.
Forgive the semantics, focus on the idea.
Use a bit torrent style method of sharing bandwidth. Say one lonely PC can store 100mb of data, 15mb of which can be shared on the internet per day to save end-user costs x the number of Linux installs, prolly not a bad use for distributed computing and bandwidth sharing if I have ever heard of one.
Open Source Search Engine.
The time is now.
Re:Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is it (Score:2)
Re:Is it (Score:2)
Re:Is it (Score:2)
Re:Is it (Score:2)
The latency for receiving any specific bit of data over these types of protocols is very high compared to what we're used to from the big name search engines.
Think of how (not) fast Coral Cache pages are... Sure, they're faster than the site you're trying to get to that went down 40 minutes ago, but they're damned slow compared to most average websites. Peer to Peer hosting of interactive content would have the same problems... and that's before you get in
Let me tell you how that one is going to work out (Score:2)
Adobe as a Buyout Target for Google (Score:2)
Agencies of many governments already use pdf and academica widely uses pdfs. The push for an Open Document Format could help Adobe advance pdfs as an alternative amenable to all.
If Google is going to mov
Re:Adobe as a Buyout Target for Google (Score:2)
No. It's great for displaying and printing, but basically impossible to edit (you can edit images, and change a word here and there, or fill out forms, but that's about it). It's wonderful for publishing, but useless for authoring or revision. You could embed a bunch of XML in it, and rebuild the PDF part every time you changed the text, but in that case you might as well just use the XML and render that
I wouldn't worry about IE7 (Score:2, Troll)
Its a major annoyance (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd rather... (Score:4, Funny)
Asking for trouble (Score:2)
After all the trouble Microsoft got in for bundling IE and Media Player with Windows, I would expect the people at Google (or Yahoo) to be a little smarter. Just how many million dollars do they actually want to get fined? I don't know about the USA, but the EU competition authorities do regard product bundling as an anti-competitive practice and illegal.
And frankly, Microsoft had at least a decent case that integrating a web browser and a media player in an OS makes sense, but bundling a search engine wi
Re:Asking for trouble (Score:1)
Re:Asking for trouble (Score:2)
It's like complaining that you get free magazines on your airplane flight. Or getting Wikipedia links posted related to the slashdot story. Even Adsense may be considered bundling because when you visit a website, you get a lot of related (or unrelated) links.
hmm?? firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hmm?? firefox (Score:1)
Re:hmm?? firefox (Score:2)
That's probably because Firefox doesn't have 90% of the browser market, doesn't come preinstalled with an operating system that accounts for 95% of the personal computer market, and so far never has engaged in blatant anti-competitive behavior.
Adobe Acrobat: The Intervention (Score:5, Funny)
Acrobat: Wha... what are all you guyes doing here?
Photoshop: Acrobat, first we'd like to say the-- WE LOVE YOU... Everybody in this room loves you... And we're worried... about YOU.
Acrobat: What's going on?
Photshop: Acrobat, you have to stop this.
Acrobat: Stop what? What do you mean "stop"? Stop what?
Photoshop: Here, read this...
Acrobat: Humm... RrrRRrrrrRrr... Humm... Would you mind if I just call the office and make sure there's no updates before I read you this document? No? Ok, but there' could be a security issue.... Hummm... RrRrrRRrr... Hummm...
Foxit: Give me that! [Snatches document from Acrobat's hands] You know what this says, Adobe? It says you've put on weight... AGAIN. No one can remember the last time you were under 10Mb! And at this rate, you'll be pushing 30Mb by the end of the year!
Acrobat: Hey! Today's document rendering world is COMPLEX, I've just be putting on a little extra CODE to get the job done!
Foxit: Oh that is such bullshit Acrobat! I do nearly everything you do, and I'm still under 3Mb!
Photoshop: Acrobat, it's time you admitted you have a problem. For starters, you're going to have to stop haning around with those Google and Yahoo kids, they're TROUBLE.
Foxit:
Photoshop: Foxit, oh god no! Acrobat hasn't been able to manage documents of that size for years, he's so out-of-shape! What have you done? Call 9-1-1!
End scene
600 x 768 web pages.. (Score:4, Insightful)
google, msn, yahoo, viewport?, and others. Whats left for the webpage itself?
Google's Target Audience (Score:2, Insightful)
You keep using this word illiterate (Score:2)
Google should pay me a "significant amount" (Score:4, Funny)
When will they ever understand that.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Competition (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmmm, This is either simply Google bidding the most for their tool bar to be bundled with some very widely used software, or the battle lines within the IT sector are getting a little more defined.
Personally I would prefer to be able to download and install an application that does whatever the job is I want doing; without installing any other "useful" application's - regardless of which "well selected" partner it comes from. However from a non technical perspective this may well become interesting.
Now to me it is starting to look as though Microsoft are feeling less in control of their ability to "lock" users to their software. This appears to be the reason for the plethora of new proprietary file formats that they can force into the main stream with Vista. It will be interesting to see if there is any fight against the formats or if the rest of the software industry will carry out its own embrace and extend exercise... After all this time round they are not providing "new" functionality but rather revamping existing standards and encroaching on other companies areas of expertise.
Google should add a decent dedicated document search feature that is purely an index of ODF, PDF, Rich/Plain Text etc.. and exclude XPS until it sees mainstream use at least, and offer links to - the original document - html version - adobe acrobat / open office. Im not certain if Adobe will or even should, but I would also like to see adobe and open office support the XPS standard for reading, if not necessarily for export.
What happened to.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Bundling Google Toolbar with other products is evil in my book. I don't want Google's toolbar. I don't want Yahoo's toolbar. I don't want their crap on my machine.
Will this come bundled with Flash? (Score:4, Informative)
Claim dial-up (Score:3, Interesting)
Other software already doing this (Score:2, Interesting)
But wait! Lo and behold, Google Toolbar for Firefox was installed. And Google Desktop Search. Yeah, just start indexing my entire drive without asking, thanks! I should've known something was up with a download size of 14 megs.
And yes, I know about ffdshow and all tho
Downside(s) to Google Toolbar? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm serious. I've been an avid user of Google since early 1999 or so, and Gmail since a few months after it came out. Like many technologists, I am somewhat of a Google evangelist.
What worries me is that Google records one's clickstream as one searchs and I can only presume that Google Toolbar could easily be modified to "phone home" about anything of interest to Google (or the NSA), particularly about what it finds on your local hard dr
Is there anything that doesn't try to install it? (Score:2)
I already knew about the flash thing, because the other day I had to get the latest version to view some web art. I can't recall exactly what else tried to install Google toolbar, but I know I've seen others. I always say "NO" to Google's spyware. Yeah, yeah. Google is a bunch of intellectuals with high ideals and a philosophy. So was communism.
The only thing that pisses me off more is Quacktime installing iTunes. I've got Yahoo Music Unlimited, I was quite concerned that it would step on my player
Google ignores one market (Score:2)
Adobe assault (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Toolbar? (Score:1)
Re:Did I miss something? (Score:2)
I see you didn't install a google bar.
Re:Did I miss something? (Score:2)
But if you insist on using IE there'll be no way of avoiding some 'features' like this.
Re:Correct me if i'm wrong... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Only with IE? Good! (Score:2, Informative)