Like everybody else, SourceForge has now joined the dark side, and they are providing downloads with bundled nonsense under a program they call DevShare. We’re leaving this article here for historical reference, but it has since stopped these shady practices. Update: Since the writing of this article, SourceForge has been sold to a new company that stopped the DevShare program discussed in this article. ![]() Note that we aren't talking about Ninite (which we do recommend) in this article because that isn't so much a download site as it is a service to install software while skipping the crapware. Because the fact is that everybody is doing it to some extent by providing downloads that include this nonsense - the worst offenders are adding their own install wrapper to make sure that you get punished. We're just going to go through the list of all the top sites and illustrate all of the crappy adware awfulness that is being bundled. The latest trend is pushing lookalike copies of Google Chrome with adware bundled directly into them. They hijack browsers, insert ads, and they even use hidden services with deep dark API functions. ![]() ![]() They change the text or, in some cases, they make it look exactly like a terms and conditions screen. Nobody reads the fine print, just like nobody reads the installers when they are clicking through.Īnd some of these installers are extremely tricky. We were unable to find a single freeware download site that isn't listing bundleware awfulness, and while a few of them attempt to do the right thing and alert you when something is bundled, it's just not good enough.
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