Todd Sampson

I’m not talking about Adobe’s design software monopoly. (Which they do seem to have.) Or their stock going through the roof. (Like the old Microsoft.) Or even the fact that the software itself is insanely expensive. (No need to comment here.) I am talking about the applications themselves.

I just downloaded the trail of Photoshop CE. When I went to install the application, it made me close Firefox. What?? How can a design application need me to close my web browser — unless it is installing something that interfaces with Firefox. I didn’t see anything asking me to agree to that, so I will just assume I am being paranoid.

But further, the application is insanely huge. Bloatware++. The download was over 700 megabytes. When I installed the application, it needed 1.8 gigabytes — with a “G”. How can this be. Photoshop has been great since about version 3.5, when it was relatively tiny. I can’t imagine what they have added over the last several years to make the install grow this large. What am I missing here?