Apart from using Google’s web apps, I have cleaned my Mac of Google’s apps. Chrome is great — I’d love to have it. I don’t need Picasa. Google Earth would be cool to have, but just that: cool. I don’t do 3D, and I can’t add buildings to Croatia, so SketchUp is useless. Google Video and Voice Chat would be great to have, but it’s still somewhat unstable, and besides, I don’t have anyone to do video and voice with on a regular basis. And Google Gears was never updated for 64-bit and Snow Leopard so I could use Offline Gmail.
But all this is not a real reason. I love to have a lot of junk apps, just in case I’ll run them every once in a while. The real reason is the hyper annoying, unconfigurable, trojan-like piece of shit called Google Software Update. In its current incarnation, it still does not announce its presence to the tech un-savvy Mac user. It does not provide any configuration whatsoever. And it silently accesses my Internet connection.
Yes, that means that I’m doing a hyper important update of a web site over piss-poor WLAN (I have a few locations where the connection is very, very sluggish and unreliable), or even if I’m doing it over bandwidth-capped EDGE connection over my phone, Google Software Update will think it prudent to kick in and silently fetch updates.
I never, ever expected such disregard for user’s needs from Google. Just because this is a Mac, they believe everyone is hyper-rich, always on broadband and never on slow net, and never, ever unable to afford random software updates grabbed over capped EDGE.
Guess again, Google! I don’t want you to fetch updates randomly, and I don’t want to be alerted every few hours by the firewall that you’re trying to fetch an update. At the same time, if I blocked just your update program, I have no idea what else I’ll break.
A total lack of transparency when installing Software Update makes me call it a trojan: it doesn’t transparently present itself when installing, it sits silently in background invisible during normal use, it performs potentially malicious tasks.
Oh, and you can’t block its installation. Even if it’s a separate component in the installer (Google Voice and Video Plugin), it’s marked as required. Required my ass — let me keep the software out-of-date, and get off my lawn!
Hence, I’ll give up on all the “benefits” of various Google apps on Mac, and call it a day. And I’ll post this rant, just on the off chance it’s read by someone on Google’s Mac team. Or on the off chance that it gets picked up by some statistics bot they run.
Tags: Google, Google Software Update, Internet, transparency, updates
This entry was posted by Ivan Vučica on Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Mac, Mac OS X, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Personal web site You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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I have completely uninstalled all Google applications for the same reason.
I am unaware of any other application that silently self-updates (with no preference controls) other than spyware. Both Windows and Mac OS give the user control over automatic software updates–Google does not.
I’ve heard the argument that Google would like to ensure they don’t end up with an installed base of zillion old versions of Chrome, so they arrogantly require all Google applications to be kept up-to-date–take it or leave it.
For a company with as many bright people as they supposedly have, you would think it would occur to them to simply hound people when they visit google.com with an old version of Chrome. E.g., a banner at the top of google.com like “Hey, we’ve noticed you’re running an out-of-date version of Chrome. The old version has bugs and doesn’t conform to the latest standards. Please upgrade.” It’s their browser; they could get away with it.
It’s hilarious to me because the forced-upgrade approach is the exact opposite of their approach with Android. They have a zillion old versions which they can’t–or won’t–update, even if the user wants a later version that is proven to run on the hardware.
“Android is open.” “Don’t be evil.” Sure.