Download.com's dubious top five freeware

It was sad to see VersionTracker absorbed by the Borg collective at Cnet — a cumbersome site devoid of personality. VersionTracker had changed over the years, but — to its credit — managed to retain something of its indie roots.

No use crying about it, though. Download.com is here to stay, so we can either get used it or take our patronage to MacUpdate. I decided to give Download.com a chance, and was immediately attracted to a link called Top Freeware. After all, there might be some stuff there worthy of inclusion in the thriftmac collection.

Here are Download.com’s top five freeware apps, as measured by how often they’ve been downloaded:
1. VLC Media Player
2. YouTube Downloader+
3. RAR Expander
4. AVG Linkscanner
5. uTorrent

VLC is totally understandable, because it can play just about any media file you throw at it. And I’ll go along with uTorrent as one of the best bittorrent clients (along with Transmission) available for the Mac.

But let’s have a closer look at those other three interlopers.

YouTube Downloader+: I can only assume people are downloading this because the name is descriptive of something they would like to do: download YouTube videos. First of all, I couldn’t get this ugly Java thing to work. But why would I want to when I’ve got Safari? Here’s how: Navigate to the video you want, open the Activity window and find the biggest file in the list, then double-click it. You’ll get a file called videoplayback.flv in your download folder, which plays just fine in VLC.

RAR Expander: Mac users sometimes receive files from their Windows-using friends that are compressed using the RAR format, so of course they go looking for a program that will expand it. It’s only natural that they would use the keywords “RAR” and “expander” in their search. Unfortunately it leads to RAR Expander as the top hit. Sure it supports Applescript, but you’re unlikely to need this. Do yourself a favour and scroll a bit further for a program worthy of space on your Mac — UnRarX. Nice interface, nice icon, and yes it will expand those RAR files nicely.

AVG Linkscanner: This one is baffling. I don’t mean to offend any Windows users, but I can only assume this seemingly pointless app is being downloaded by switchers used to the paranoia that comes with the threat of viruses in the Windows world. Macs are indeed vulnerable, but there has been no widespread exploitation that I know of in recent years. If you’re thinking of installing it anyway, consider the plight of this commenter at Download.com: “It is taking me hours to remove this crap! Causing nothing but trouble with my machine.” Update: the October 2010 issue of MacLife rates AVG Linkscanner as lame: “Seemingly random distribution of caution badges. Dramatic-sounding definitions of risks don’t actually say anything.”

date posted Posted Wednesday, September 8, 2010 in

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  1. You’re pretty much just off the mark on this one, on several points. I’m not sure which filter you applied when you went to “Free”, but the listings there are not the same now. And yesterday some were different as well.

    As someone who works simultaneously on Snow Leopard and XP-SP3+, the issue with AVG Linkscanner is not as you present it. Macs aren’t half as secure as Mac users like to think, and part of that misconception has to do with the proportion of users on different platforms. No point in a hacker attack setup of a spider or bot to target the lesser part of a users out there. And Mac still is the lesser part to great degree.

    AVG LinkScanner is free anti-identity-theft software for scanning internet sites for thieving script as well as shielding the user from script bots that can enter a machine through web files load upon visitation. Macs are just as vulnerable to this as PC, as most of the information sought is handled by the browser, regardless of what platform. Such software is also helps to secure personal information. And while any decent security package does far better (and the Unix firewall under Mac OS is not full security for this), as freeware, it is well worth at such freeware packages, because they are better nothing) for those who cannot afford a commercial (or industrial) package. It is very obvious why this package is sought in our current economic climate, and you missed the boat entirely on this one.

    You should find out more concerning a software package and what it is really about/for before commenting on it.

    JC Hendee





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