Oh for the Love of God!

See, what I think 99% of the mitch­ers and bon­ers on the net don’t get, is that iTunes is built on Webkit… The major­ity of what makes Safari work is ALREADY ON THEIR PC IF THEY HAVE iTUNES!!!!!

Apple’s doing noth­ing wrong here… Some peo­ple just seem to have WAY too much fsckin time on their hands.

not a fan­boi.. just some­one that val­ues com­mon sense and sees very lit­tle in this idi­otic argument…

drunk­ard:

p>Wait, what? Did you just actu­ally com­pare Apple with a drug dealer?

Well yes. The fact that there are huge dif­fer­ences between Apple and drug deal­ers doesn’t pre­clude the two from hav­ing points of sim­i­lar­ity. In this case, Apple is force­fully and rather unpleas­antly try­ing to get peo­ple to use its prod­ucts. Sort of like a drug dealer harass­ing some­one to buy gear. Far from being “retarded”, I think my com­ment was rather apt.

You’re an idiot.

Just say­ing.

lkm, Seeing as how you argue that .dmg drag installs are bro­ken, your opin­ion is essen­tially worth­less. You’re dead to me.

@26justme iTunes is based on WebKit now? It never used to be.

But I agree that this is a non-issue. It isn’t like Safari, say, auto­mat­i­cally runs after installing, imports all your data from Internet Explorer, changes your home page and sets itself as you pre­ferred browser by default. That would just be uncouth.

(Yes, a fresh install of Firefox just did all of those things.)

@26justme iTunes is based on WebKit now? It never used to be.

But I agree that this is a non-issue. It isn’t like Safari, say, auto­mat­i­cally runs after installing, imports all your data from Internet Explorer, changes your home page and sets itself as you pre­ferred browser by default. That would just be uncouth.

(Yes, a fresh install of Firefox just did all of those things.)

I’d be OK, yeah, as long as I could des­e­lect it. Which, oh my god!, I can do here! It’s like I’m not stu­pid or something!

@Ken Pierson

Would you really think it was OK for Firefox to default to installing Thunderbird at every update? Would you want Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, etc. all to do the same thing with their products?

Actually, if, dur­ing the Firefox install it popped up a dia­log ask­ing if I wanted to install Thunderbird, with the box checked; I would uncheck it and get on with my life. But then again, I’m not a whiny twat.

@The Angry Drunk:

Actually, if, dur­ing the Firefox install it popped up a dia­log ask­ing if I wanted to install Thunderbird, with the box checked; I would uncheck it and get on with my life.

Not the install, every sin­gle update. And not just Firefox, every pro­gram by any­one with more than one product.

Personally, I like it when updates are updates and I don’t have to scru­ti­nize them. But that’s me.

But then again, I’m not a whiny twat.

Right, your bitch­ing has bold tags and pro­fan­ity. That’s totally better.

Didn’t any­one think about check­ing the “Ignore update” but­ton? Never see the evil Safari again. How come there is no cheese served with all this whine?

There is noth­ing mali­cious about Apple’s deci­sion here. It is sim­ply part of the mod­ern cor­po­rate cul­ture to make assump­tions in favor of the cor­po­ra­tion and require the indi­vid­ual to expend effort if they wish things to be otherwise.

detri­tus make an impor­tant point about trust. In this cur­rent cli­mate of need­ing to reg­u­lar install secu­rity update to soft­ware, we need the aver­age user to trust Apple, Microsoft etc. and install updates when they are released. If some one runs soft­ware update and as a result ends up with some new piece of soft­ware installed on their com­puter, that they did not want, next time soft­ware update pops up they may just hit “can­cel” and miss an impor­tant secu­rity update.

90% of the nerd rage on this issue would turn to vapor if the Windows uers com­plain­ing would admit that it’s mostly because they see Apple as “the enemy”. It’s anti-fanboyism at it’s worst.

Or, they could just note that the appli­ca­tion is “Apple Software Update”, not “iTunes Update”. If you don’t want other Apple soft­ware, then don’t fuck­ing run Apple Software Update.

“Apple is force­fully and rather unpleas­antly try­ing to get peo­ple to use its prod­ucts. Sort of like a drug dealer harass­ing some­one to buy gear. ”

DRUG DEALERS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. They sell you what you fuck­ing ask for. Also, I don’t know what “gear” is. I don’t think drug deal­ers even sell “gear.” Usually, some­one goes to a drug dealer for mar­i­juana or cocaine, but goes to the mall if they want a new pair of skis.

@Percent

90% of the nerd rage on this issue would turn to vapor if the Windows uers com­plain­ing would admit that it’s mostly because they see Apple as “the enemy”. It’s anti-fanboyism at it’s worst.

Bing Bing Motherfucking Bing. Percent wins the gods damn prize. To expand, for any of you fuck­ers who thinks that I actu­ally care one way or another what Apple, or Mozilla, or Microsoft for that mat­ter does with their soft­ware updates; lis­ten care­fully, I don’t.

What does get my bile up is the breath­less rush to bang out an anti-Apple or anti-fucking-anybody blog post just to show your ant-whoever-the-fuck cred.

One of the most annoy­ing aspects of the aver­age Mac “fan­boi,” and the aspect that rightly gar­ners the most deri­sion from ratio­nal peo­ple is the instant assump­tion that any­thing that Microsoft does is “evil.” Microsoft, Apple, hells even your pre­cious fuck­ing Google are not evil. They are cor­po­ra­tions that have a fidu­ciary respon­si­bil­ity to their share­hold­ers to max­i­mize profit.

I’m sorry that that real­ity gets you all weepy, but them’s the facts. And the other truth is, Asa Dotzler doesn’t give a shit about you lit­tle fucks. His job is to evan­ge­lize Firefox. Sadly he chooses to do so by post­ing retarded fuck­ing screeds about Safari. Really, all I can do is pity you twits who buy into it.

@Ken Pierson

Right, your bitch­ing has bold tags and pro­fan­ity. That’s totally better.

But yet you’re here, so I guess I win. Tell you what, when you get the balls to add a link to your blog I’ll play by your rules. Until then, you’re in my house, you deal with my style.

Darby,

If you think peo­ple actu­ally know how images work or intu­itively fig­ure it out when they encounter one, or that they actu­ally read the text next to pre­s­e­lected check­boxes, I sug­gest you get to know some peo­ple who aren’t geeks. Just because some­thing works for you does not mean that it works for every­one, or that other peo­ple are dumb if it doesn’t work for them.

I don’t “argue” that .dmg installing is bro­ken. I know it’s bro­ken, from many obser­va­tions of how “nor­mal” peo­ple try to use them and expect them to behave.

I sug­gest you sit in on a usabil­ity test. It’s eye-opening how many things we take as granted sim­ply don’t work for many oth­er­wise per­fectly intel­li­gent humans.

“Again, the take home mes­sage here is that Windows users are so fuck­ing con­fused by a check­box that they can’t be trusted with the hor­ri­ble respon­si­bil­ity of installing a browser. ”

No, the take home mes­sage is that with the check­box selected, Software Update degrades from “soft­ware that makes your life eas­ier because you can just click to install any­thing it asks for and it’ll actu­ally Update your Software” to “soft­ware that may or may not install new crap in addi­tion to being useful”.

That new crap has now been iso­lated to a new list to facil­i­tate eas­ier des­e­lect­ing is progress, don’t get me wrong. But the angle you describe peo­ple like me as push­ing is “peo­ple is stu­pid and can’t uncheck check­boxes”. That’s not it. People just don’t read. People have to deal with tons of text every day when they use a com­puter, and when annoy­ing dialogs come up they read as lit­tle as they can to get the damn thing out of their faces. (This is why “Don’t Save”, “Cancel” and “Save” are bet­ter labels than “Yes”, “No” and “Cancel”; one set makes you read the mes­sage, one doesn’t.)

And no mat­ter what you think of it, a fuck­ing soft­ware updater appli­ca­tion has def­i­nitely been tossed in the pile of “I don’t need to read this, and it is good for me if I click Install”. I’m not draw­ing a pic­ture of clue­less morons think­ing this, we all do this every day so we’ll have time to read (or write) essays on check­box seman­tics with all the time we save, unless we hap­pen to be ter­ri­bly inter­ested in one of the par­tic­u­lar updates which I assure you is rare.

Anyway. My point is still “when the check­box is pre­s­e­lected, you actu­ally have to give a crap about Software Update”. It’s much eas­ier to give a crap about Software Update now since the new soft­ware pack­age isn’t drown­ing in QuickTime secu­rity updates or iTunes revi­sions that improves sta­bil­ity and adds sup­port for the new hooloovoo iPod shuf­fle, and maybe that’s enough. This isn’t really about Firefox devel­op­ers being mad because they can’t hitch a ride for autoin­stal­la­tion (don’t Firefox come pre­in­stalled with Dell or HPs, I for­get which?), and I’m guess­ing you know that, but it’s expe­di­ent to frame the issue as invented by the dis­grun­tled com­pe­ti­tion, because oth­er­wise it’s just peo­ple argu­ing about checkboxes.

For com­plete­ness, let’s say “peo­ple is stu­pid and can’t uncheck check­boxes” was an inten­tional and com­pletely unem­bar­rass­ing typo, meant to amplify the point that peo­ple are indeed stu­pid, instead of me for­get­ting the basics of English gram­mar for a split second.

@Jesper I’m not fram­ing the issue. I’m also not the Mozilla foun­da­tion employee who won’t drop this non-issue; and who’s spend­ing far more time on his blog defend­ing his com­ments than I am here.

You’re right though, in the end this boils down to a dis­agree­ment over a freak­ing check­box in an app that no one even needs to use. I think that some peo­ple are under the impres­sion that I have skin in this game. I don’t. I nei­ther agree nor dis­agree with Asa’s posi­tion. What I have a prob­lem with is the blogosphere’s psy­chotic need to whip every Apple related non-issue that it comes across into the sec­ond com­ing of Elvis.

my bad.. I guess it’s a com­mon mis-statement that I picked up on, as I’ve even seen it referred to in, um, places that should know bet­ter I guess…

@Jesper:

“But the angle you describe peo­ple like me as push­ing is “peo­ple is stu­pid and can’t uncheck check­boxes”. That’s not it. People just don’t read.”

I’m not fol­low­ing. Not read­ing is a stu­pid behav­ior. So, how does this argu­ment that they “just don’t read” indi­cate that they aren’t stu­pid? It proves the point.

All I can say Mr. Angry Drunk.… AMEN brother!

Just wait though, there is going to be a whole new round of whin­ing about this update.

What really ran­kles me is, where are all the Microsoft is evil peo­ple when Microsoft updates their com­puter with­out even giv­ing them a warn­ing or even a mes­sage until after the deed is done.

After I updated QuickTime on one of my Windows boxes and rebooted. I was informed that Microsoft had updated my OS with­out my prior knowl­edge or con­sent. So where are all the enraged blog posts about how Microsoft is evil and such? Sheesh!

Actually, to coin ‘Windows users’ as con­fused and not to be trusted with a check­box is a bit of a…well very weak point.

I don’t know the soft­ware update on OS X, but if that also defaults to offer­ing new soft­warem, I bet many Mac users just click through blindly as well, installing new soft­ware with­out them know­ing. It’s just that there are more Windows users, thus more pos­si­ble com­plain­ers. I think there are more Windows novices with a weblog than Mac novices.

Plus of course, it’s Apple soft­ware update on a Windows Machine. Say you installed Office for Mac; after a few weeks the update thingy runs, and by default it also offers to install Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker for Mac (if those existed). If that day ever came, your, Grubers and many other Mac-bloggers head would prob­a­bly explode in the process of loathing Microsoft.