Flash Player opt-in vs opt-out
Posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 @ 11:29 CET
From an article on Inc from 2002:
The opt-out system, however, acts as a "tacit yes." ... It strikes us that companies that limit themselves to these choices aren't effectively serving the needs of customers or themselves.The article was talking about opt-in versus opt-out email - a debate that ended years ago and its pretty well understood throughout the industry that opt-in is the way to go. The customer needs to make the decision, period.
So colour me surprised when I recently went to download the Flash Player and was presented with other stuff I could install along with it. Incredibly, these "add-ons" were selected by default! Has Adobe not been paying attention? This is "evil" behaviour after all.
If you're on a Mac you won't see these add-ons at all, but I was installing Flash on a VMWare instance running Windows XP. I took a few screenshots in Safari, using the Developer toolbar to fake the user-agent.
If you're running Internet Explorer you are presented with the option of downloading the Google Toolbar. It clearly states that it's optional, but then again its also selected by default.
The Google Toolbar is arguably useful. But on Firefox, on Firefox you're presented with an option to download McAfee Security Scan Plus. What the?
Now I've been told by people that have installed this by accident that it screwed up their existing anti-virus solution rendering it useless.
Lastly I visited the page pretending to be Opera and lo and behold you are presented with no extra options:
Awesome for Opera users, not so awesome for everyone else.
My question is why bother with the extras? Obviously Adobe is earning some money from these partnership deals, but they are also wasting their user's time and effort as well as annoying them. I assume this extra income is enough to ignore the fact that this practice tarnishes both Adobe's reputation and relationship with their users.
Of course I may be wrong and users don't really care.
However as someone who develops for the Flash Platform, I'm disappointed.
- paulo
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Comments:
The reason for this is, frankly, that Adobe is getting paid for the additional installs, and the install ratio is probably a lot higher if the checkbox is activated by default rather than deactivated.
Don't forget that they are offering the Flash Player for free although it implies huge developer efforts.
I agree that in an ideal world it would be better to not have those extra installs, but then I don't really mind that much. Consider a possible different approach: offering a free Flash Player version infested with ads and a "Premium", ad-free version you have to pay for. Quite a common road, but, fortunaltely, not one Adobe would travel.
There could just as well be ads on the download page, and compared to that I consider the solution described in your post quite unintrusive. Not as much as if it were opt-in, but still… ;-)
Best regards
C.
# July 09, 2010 11:59 CET
The day Adobe starts charging for the player Flash is dead.
They make their money selling the tools you use to develop for the platform, and one of the most compelling arguments to develop for the Flash Platform is its ubiquity. Charging for the player would definitely change that.
# July 09, 2010 12:07 CET
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