Where is the Silverlight nag install controversy?

(click for full screen install image)

After following the Safari 3.1 on Windows installation controversy here, here. and here, I can't help but wonder why anyone that has to go to Microsoft.com on a regular basis hasn't cried out in agony at the unavoidable prompt to install Silverlight. Here's how this is a horrendous user experience:

It is unavoidable. Think Emperor Palpatine's voice from Return of the Jedi. No matter where on Microsoft's site you go to, MSDN, Mactopia, Sysinternals, you are going to get prompted to install Silverlight.

You can't ignore it. No matter how many times you click the X on the prompt, go back to the Microsoft site later, you are going to get prompted again. Over and over and over again.

It's a roadblock to whatever you are trying to do. Instead of the prompt being unobtrusive and just happens to show to anyone without Silverlight installed in a corner somewhere, no, it is a modal prompt for Microsoft.com. click here to see the full "experience"

Update
Ed Bott posted a comment on this post which included a link to a post of his own. His comment seemed like he was trying to help, but confusing because as I clearly show in the screenshot above, there is no "No Thanks" next to the X. I went to his post, where I was greeted with the unfriendly title Generating fake outrage over Silverlight. Clearly, Ed thought I was trying to counter the posts about the bad Safari on Windows install prompt experience (which again I think is bad), which is not the case. I thought it strange that no one, either Windows or Mac focused, had said anything about the poor user experience I was seeing with Silverlight install prompts on *.microsoft.com (the star is very important) with all the talk of Safari on Windows floating around. In Ed's post, he provides one piece of invaluable information, the screenshot of Firefox with the Silverlight install prompt cookie name, to solving this tech mystery. I could have done without the condescension (Side note: of course I have heard of cookies Ed, but it shouldn't have to be my job to figure out the *.microsoft.com cookie strategy to not be prompted to install Silverlight), but a tip of the hat to Ed for at least providing the screenshot. This is what is going on:

Ed is absolutely right that if you go to www.microsoft.com, you see these prompts (click for larger versions):

Internet Explorer 7	Firefox 2.0.0.14	Safari 3.1.1

When you click on No Thanks (X) on any of these, a cookie is put on your machine that expires in 1 month (click each image for larger version):

Internet Explorer 7	Firefox 2.0.0.14	Safari 3.1.1

How am I seeing a continual prompt to install Silverlight then? You have to understand how I have been using the microsoft site. I hadn't gone directly to www.microsoft.com until yesterday. I only go directly to other dedicated hosts, these are the two I have been using most, and I was testing with yesterday:

• msdn2.microsoft.com
• The Sysinternals section of technet.microsoft.com

If you visit either of these sites in Internet Explorer only without the www.microsoft.com cookie, you get the original prompt I show at the top of this post (Firefox and Safari do not offer this prompt even without the cookie). If you click the X on this prompt, no cookie is ever set to record your choice of not wanting Silverlight. Here is the state of my IE cookies before going to MSDN, after MSDN loads but before hitting X on the Silverlight prompt, and after hitting X on the Silverlight prompt (click for larger images):

Internet Explorer Cookies Before Going to MSDN

Internet Explorer Cookies After Going to MSDN, but before clicking X on the Silverlight install prompt

Internet Explorer Cookies After Going to MSDN, and after clicking X on the Silverlight install prompt. Notice no change (other than my slightly different cropping of the window)

There is also some kind of session timeout involved in seeing the prompt in IE. If you haven't been to either of the above sites I list in some time, then you will get the prompt to install, and you can get them to display back to back. I have been seeing this for well over a month. Ed posted another comment saying that Silverlight devs/support techs know about this and it's a rare bug. That said, if you have the cookie from www.microsoft.com in your browser, you won't see the prompt on sub-sites, well at least for a month, so unless on the other hosts this gets fixed/changed or the cookie expires, you can use that as a workaround

One final point, I have nothing directly against Silverlight (I have concerns about it, but I talked about those last year). I am just trying to keep a development VM clean from unwanted software, to get as close as possible to a known deployment target, and Silverlight is not on the manifest. Obviously, just installing it is the most permanent workaround, and I have had the beta's installed on OS X for a long time. Read my other Silverlight posts

Annoyance: Apple TV downloads purchased TV Season episodes in random order

I have talked a lot about Apple TV, and I have explored replacing cable/satellite with an Apple TV. Well, since the Apple TV 2.0 software update came out, the possibility has greatly increased with direct downloads. But so far, there is one very significant hitch, when you download a TV season you have downloaded, the episodes come down in random order! How did this get through QA? Did no one actually buy a TV Season on Apple TV, or think, gee, let's download the episodes in episode # order?!?!?!? The mind boggles...

You say this is just convenience? Try telling that to your wife after you just bought her 20 something episodes of a show she wants to watch. Worse, it messes up the caching. The files get timestamped in the wrong order, so if you use 5 least recent unwatched in iTunes to manage cached files, you get the last 5 episodes of the season. I'll be filing a bug on this in the morning...

Microsoft Annoyance #001: Crazy Version and Service Pack Numbering

A co-worker IMed me a little while ago and asked me what the current Service Pack for Visual Studio 2005 is. I fired back cocksure that it was SP2, even thinking to myself can't he just google this? Then a pang of doubt entered my mind and I decided to check, I already had Visual Studio 2005 open, it was only going to take a second. And this is what I see:

What? The standard naming procedure for an update to a shipped Microsoft product has been since, oh 1995 at least, a Service Pack or SP for short (except Office, they used Service Releases for a while, but have "corrected" that mistake). Service Packs start at SP1 and go up from there until Microsoft decides to stop releasing cumulative updates containing all the hotfixes that exist for that product. Another exception is when the first public release of an SP is bugged, then they append a letter, like SP1a. So what is going on with the Visual Studio version number? It appears I might have a Service Pack installed, but which one? Why do I have to Google which Service Pack I have installed? Does this Visual Studio 2005 SP1 landing page inform me how to tell if I have it installed? No. The release notes? No. What's New? Try again. How about the download itself? Ah yes, I have to match up the version here to the one in the Visual Studio 2005 About dialog. Crazy. It took me 5 minutes to dig through links looking for a clear-cut way to tell.

This isn't just a Visual Studio 2005 problem either. Here is the huge About dialog from SQL Server 2005 Management Studio:

Maybe dumber, just version numbers of various components. If you are going to use terminology like Service Pack or the abbreviated SP, you should always have it in your About dialogs. What is so hard about doing even this simple thing consistently?

Blogger Annoyance #002 - Adding Labels/Tags to old Blogger posts adds the item to the feed as new

If you are a subscriber to the RSS feed, you might occasionally see posts that make no sense given the date, like this Are you ready for Halo 2?. This is because I have forgotten from time to time that labeling/taging old posts on Blogger puts them back in the RSS feed as new. For someone as anal as I am about having meta data be correct, this is very annoying because I want to go through all old posts and make them right over time, but I don't want them to show-up in the feed. And thus I do nothing.

Blogger Annoyance #001 - No Editing Comments for You

I responded to a bunch of comments on my JavaScript post since I got a lot of conclusions wrong about what was happening (key takeaway: always check your assumptions!) and it frustrated me that that you can't edit comments once posted. I mean this has annoyed me before, but I missed a bunch of editing errors this time. Sorry, sick day so I am a bit foggy and the stupid comment window is way to small. What can you do once this happens? You can trash your comments and start over or just let the typos stand. Oh well, the typos stand because I don't have the patience to copy and paste and edit all the typos and editing mistakes out.

Mac OS X Annoyance #002: Artifical Restriction for files in the Trash

This restriction seems ridiculous to me. I mean, why? Could apps have problems opening apps from the Trash? That's the only reason I can think of. Can I test that? In fact, yes.

What would I expect to happen when I double-clicked on Picture 1.png? Open in Preview.app of course. Can I make that happen another way? Let's find out. First of all, where is the user's trash? That's easy, it's the .Trash directory in your home directory. Open Terminal and run ls -al to see the directory. Execute cd .Trash to get into the directory. Now run open "picture 1.png". Tada, it opens in Preview immediately, no problem. WTF? The .Trash directory is a hidden directory in UNIX (because of the dot prefix, works the same for files), could that be the reason for preventing opening files from the Trash, apps might not understand it? If that's true, Preview has no problem, and while there is a clear workaround to fixing this, from the user's perspective, this just makes no sense. Hopefully in Leopard...

Web Annoyance #001: MSN Video's dodgy browser detection

I downloaded Camino for Mac OS X this morning based seeing it recommended in Apps you can't live without on the O'Reilly Mac DevCenter. I happened to go to MSNBC and tried to play a video when I saw this:

Piece of crap. I was annoyed because of browser detection in general, and specifically I thought Camino is never going to take off when you can't even get past a gate like this. So I tried to open the site in Firefox 2, Firefox 1.5, and Safari 2.0, and I see the same damn pop-up! MSN Video was made directly Mac compatible a couple months ago, switching to Flash video, but it looks like someone can't figure out how to do browser detection, let alone get rendering engine detection right.

Update
I configured the site last night to use Google Analytics and after I created this post I logged on to cruise the reports. One thing it reports on is Flash versions, and I went to see how many were out there. Quite a lot actually, I am seeing at least 10 different versions, with 9.0 r28, 9.0, and 9.0 r45 making up 78.98% of my current traffic. 9.0 r45? I vaguely remember seeing 9.0 r28 installed, *gasp*, could I be behind the latest? Sure 'nough, I am, 9.0 r45 is available, I install, and now I can see the MSN Video! In Safari 2 no less. WTF? I know, Step 2 in the MSN troubleshooting steps was uninstall and reinstall Flash, but I knew when I saw the pop-up I had Flash installed and it it working, I was using it on another site like 5 minutes before the MSN Video thing. I guess the title on this post is misleading now, it should really be MSN VIdeo's dodgy required components detection, because if the latest version of Flash is required to view your site, say that. Also, this is the first time in a long time I have ever had to update Flash to view anything on the Web.

Visual Studio Annoyance #001: Why is this dialog so small?

I have been working a lot the last couple months in Visual Studio 2005. One of the pages I worked on directly uses a GridView, and I have been trying to use the graphical editor to create the field markup. I really don't think it is to much to ask that if I choose to use the graphic editor, it doesn't look like this:


No I didn't resize that to make it smaller, it is exactly 512px wide. This looks insanely ridiculous on a 1280x1024 monitor, which is where I have Windows running on. It actually looks something like this:
Pretty silly.

Vista Annoyance #004: User Account Control Russian Roulette

I previously wrote about Why I think MS made some bad implementation choices on User Account Control (UAC), and here is another one.

Put yourself in the user's shoes, the technical reasons why what I am about to descibe really don't matter from the user experience (UX) perspective.


When you look at the Administrative Tools folder, of the 12 items I have on my Vista Ultimate box, only 4 show the Windows Shield icon indicating running this is going to require you to Cancel or Allow/Continue (Sidebar: Why can't we have one dialog here? Do we really need two different ways of saying the same thing?), but everything you run here shows a UAC dialog, and the same kind at that! What the frak is the point of having an indicator showing an action is going to require an authorization if it doesn't show all actions that are going to require a authorization? How can this not even be correct in Administrative Tools, which you logically should assume require Administrator rights, but Vista can't even tell us this?!?! Where is the consistency?

Check out previous posts in my Annoyance series.

Mac OS X Annoyance #001: No built-in image manipulation software

It never really hit me before, but it is almost inexplicable that OS X (up till 10.4 Tiger that is, hopefully Apple has something in 10.5 Leopard) has no included image manipulation software. What about iPhoto? iPhoto is not included in OS X, yes you get it free with new Macs, but you only get it going forward with iLlife upgrades. Besides, you can't arbitrarily draw lines, boxes, and add text to images with iPhoto. It is designed to correct digital photo problems like red eye, color levels, cropping, but it doesn't overlap with something like Photoshop.

I am not saying Apple needs to add Photoshop, or even Photoshop elements to OS X, but something more along the lines of Paint for Windows. I think Paint sucks in a lot of ways, but it can get you the basics. Come on Apple, make it happen!

UPDATE
I actually got so annoyed with the various image editing apps on OS X, none freeware and they watermarked the image I was editing (which is actually the new header on the blog), that I fired up Parallels and installed Paint.NET to bang out the change to my header image.

Vista Annoyance #003: What driver was that please?

I finally got around to installing Vista in a Parallels VM on OS X. Parallels takes whatever remaining pain there is in installing Windows XP or Vista away by capturing all the information, like product key and username, at the start of the VM install and then automates the Windows install process so you basically don't have to do anything, it totally rocks.

What doesn't rock is that all the drivers it installs aren't digitally signed so Windows pops-up the following nag dialog:

Why is this a Vista annoyance and not a Parallels annoyance for the driver thing? Because Windows is showing the user the red shield and scary red dialog title and leaves out the most critical piece of information possible, what the hell is actually causing this dialog to pop-up? What process? What driver is being installed? Then look at your choices. Which one is the better option? Both have the green arrow next to them, why is that? Should I as a normal user exercise more caution if I decided to install the driver anyway?

Vista Annoyance #002: Shared By Me search folder does not appear to work

When I setup sharing on Vista because of the lack of ISO mounting software, I found Search Folders in Windows Explorer and was surprised that the Shared By Me search folder showed no results. Here is the final dialog on setting up sharing:

If you look on the dialog, you see the Show me all the files I am sharing link, which brings up the Shared By Me search folder with no results, days later even:

I have 2 files on my Desktop that I think should be showing up in the search results, a Visio file and the Visio ISO file. I thought this was a decent way to expose users to the search folders, give them hints when they use other functionality, until it didn't work that is.

Vista Annoyance #001: No ISO mounting software built-in

This is hardly the first annoyance I have already had with Vista RTM, and I am barely a few hours into using the final version, but the issue I am going to talk about is the most infuriating from a MSDN subscriber point of view.

I started using Vista for real today, installed the RTM and Office 2007 from DVD/CD (I burned both on OS X with the included Disk Utility, assuming I would be passing the discs around), and then realized I wanted to take a look at Visio 2007. So I started downloading the ISO from MSDN. I expected that MS would have finally included ISO files as mountable images, you know, in the OS. OS X has supported mountable disk images, both its DMG format and ISO formats for a while now and I certainly expected that MS would copy this with Vista. I mean every MSDN subscriber has to mount ISO images, why wouldn't you include a driver to make ISO appear as volumes?

While waiting for the download, I tried to install the unsupported Virtual CD driver for Windows XP on Vista, which failed spectacularly, so I actually was more encouraged that Vista had ISO image support built-in. Unfortunately I was wrong, Vista doesn't know what to do with these files. The good news though is that setting up a share on Vista was a lot easier than on Windows XP because I had to enable one so I could copy the ISO file over to my MacBook Pro, mount the ISO, and then copy the contents back over to the Vista PC I am testing with. The other good news is that Windows File Sharing worked perfectly between OS X 10.4.8 and Vista :-)

Top Current Windows XP Annoyance: Stopping Office apps launching inside Internet Explorer

I get a lot of links to MS Office documents emailed to me. Something typically like http://blah.intranet.com/importantfile.doc
The problem with links like this is by default, Word will open inside of Internet Explorer, which is just ugly and makes Word functionality harder to use than it already is. Here is how to turn it off (I am using Microsoft Word as an example):

Open any Windows Explorer window, then go to the Tools menu, Folder Options, and click the File Types tab which gets you something like this


Click your file extension, e.g. DOC, that you want to change and click the Advanced button. You will see something like this


Uncheck Browse in same window and click OK and then Close.

Today's Top Windows Annoyance: Periodic System Hangs

One of the issues I have been dealing with on my IBM ThinkPad T42 with Windows XP SP2 for months has been system "pauses", or another way to think of it is "soft hangs". I didn't put it together until today, but basically anytime audio was playing, every once and a while, the screen would not paint, e.g. the cursor wouldn't move, and audio would skip. I reached my breaking point on this today and solved the problem. The problem was made worse when multitasking Whenever I encounter one of these problems, I always think to myself What would Mark Russinovich do?. I would definitely say he is one of my Windows Heroes, someone that makes working with Windows manageable, his tools are indispensable. Following his article on exploring Explorer.exe periodic system hangs I fired up Process Explorer. I had seen that System was responsible for the soft hangs numerous times, but I had always forgot about the Threads tab until re-reading the blog post. Lo and behold, kmixer.sys was taking up about 5% of CPU time and doing a lot of context switching whenever the hang occurred. So I Googled around, and it seems a lot of people have had problems with kmixer.sys before. Kmixer.sys is a kernel audio mixer, and one of the suggested fixes was to reinstall your audio drivers. On this ThinkPad, the only audio "hardware" is a Analog Devices SoundMax part. I have always disliked this solution, services and logon time apps get installed in addition to the drivers with the full driver package, and stuff just doesn't work without the full package. The most recent version I could find for the SoundMax drivers from IBM was 5.12.1.5410. I uninstalled that and then rebooted. Windows offered to search for a driver, so I decided to accept the invitation, and it automatically installed driver version 5.12.01.3624. It would seem that this older revision has done the trick, at least when the CPU is not under high stress, because I just watched an episode of Alias on ABC.com completely audio skip free under normal work load, which wasn't the case before, and I am a happy camper. Thanks Mark!

Today's Top Windows Annoyance: Restarts

I installed the Windows Live Messenger Beta Refresh just a few minutes ago. First problem, Windows was patching itself so I couldn't install this, seriously how messed up is that. I can't run > 1 installer at a time that uses Windows Installer, its like we are back in DOS. Once I could get the Windows Live Messenger running, there are is all of this crap that I have to OPT-OUT of, desktop and quick launch garbage icons, some Windows Live ID Assistant (how the @!%@ am I supposed to know if I should install this, very little information about, guess I will install it, weeeee!), and Rhapsody music service (what?!!! I thought I was installing an IM client, no way). I unselect all but the assistant, the installer churns for a while, and then, what for it, that's right, I have to reboot even thought I quit the running instance of the old Windows Live Messenger Beta (that name sucks btw, give me MSN Messenger) before kicking off the install. I am pissed because I got to close down everything, I NEVER reboot any computer (Mac or PC) unless an OS patch requires, and a f'ing IM client should NEVER force a system reboot, that's insane. Then I remember that Apple has an new ad called Restarting as part of the Get A Mac campaign and I start to laugh because I have just been hit by the PC restarting problem. For the record Microsoft Messenger for the Mac does not require a restart. I highly recommend checking out Apple's Get A Mac site and watching all the ads, they are amusing.

Top Current Windows XP Annoyance: Multiple Monitor Support

If you have ever used multiple monitor support in Windows XP, then it is highly likely you have experienced the pain I will betalking about. I use mutiple monitors when I plug my ThinkPad into a docking station for my deskbound LCD. This is what I think SHOULD happen:

• Secondary display should extend the desktop without my intervention.
• The second display should have a taskbar without the Start button.
• The icons on my primary desktop (i.e. the one permanently attached to my computer) should not move.

This is what Windows XP does:

• Nothing. I have to do something to trigger the activation of the secondary display. My current method of choice is the Thinkpad hotkey, but...
• I can't activate extending the desktop as a permanent option. I have to go into Display Properties to turn on extension and move the displays around to the proper location. I do this nearly everyday.
• After setting up the desktop, my desktop icons are moved to the new extended desktop most of the time. This is inexcusable in a 5 year old product.

Alas, I know there is a utility to do this, Ultramon (thanks to Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Tool List), but I am not paying $39.95 to get functionality that should be in Windows XP. A quick Google for what the situtation will be like in Vista reveals only that there will be unspecified improvements. CNet has this article which mentions mutiple-monitor improvements, best quote:

Suokko said the company wants to make it easier for laptops to connect to any external monitors that happen to be available. "It's there, but it's somewhat complex today," he said.

Also of potential interest for current Windows users may be MaxiVista to use a laptop or other PC as a secondary display. And MS has this article which reitereates much of what I just said. There is also an open source project, Synergy. This is not strictly a multiple monitor solution, but it does allow you to use a single mouse and keyboard across mutiple computers, Mac, Windows, or Unix. I haven't tested it yet, but it could be cool. You might want the Mac GUI for it from SynergyKM (thanks Lifehacker). And as for what the situation is like on the Mac, I have only connected one external display, a project, to my iBook a few years ago, all I remember was that it worked and I didn't have to fiddle with OS X. But I did find this Mac OS X Tiger Timesaver: Using Multiple Displays article on Dummies.com with screenshots. Looks mostly the same as in Windows XP, except you can pick which monitor the Menu Bar is put on. I might have to bring in my PowerBook to work and connect to the external LCD to see if settings persist across monitor connections, which is The Way It Should Be™.