I'm getting more and more irritated with windows apps that assume that they can do stuff that requires administrative privileges, like automatically install updates.
I don't run as an administrator because I don't want internet facing apps to mangle my system if/when they get hacked. For the past week I've been telling yahoo music engine that I don't want to upgrade now. It should be smart enough to realize that I don't have administrative rights and not prompt me.
Just now, I started to play a track and it gave me no option: it started to download the 8MB update with no way to cancel the operation, then attempted to install it, which failed.
While I'm not especially irritated by "do you want to upgrade now?" dialogs, I am very irritated by something that forces me to waste bandwidth on a download that I can't run. I don't even know where it downloaded the update to, so I might even have to download it again as the administrator. Ah, there it is: it was downloaded to %TEMP% with a temporary filename and a .tmp file extension.
This sucks; yahoo, fix your stuff.
Wez Furlong in
Windows.
A nice option for windows programs to have would be to specify a folder where programs could download the updates into. Then if for whatever reason if you don't want your software to autoupdate, it could just download the software and somehow let you know.
The fact is that most clueless windows users (including myself) run in an administrative account. For the most part I appreciate the fact that my antivirus program (the only program that I use which updates itself) does so every couple days without bothering me.
Howdy. Ian from Yahoo! here. Sorry about that.
I'll kick this over to the team so they can take a look and try to figure out what happened here.
ian
Thanks Ian.
Just out of interest, did you land here because of the bug report I filed, or through some other means?
Wez Furlong in
Comment.
I didn't see the bug report, those don't come to me. My friend Jon Bauer sent me here.
ian
I think Microsoft swapped the names? So called "average users" are (mostly) Administrators and so called "admins" are (mostly) average users.
Peeps who have nothing to administrate don't need the extra protection.(joke) I do think you would have less reason to complain if it was called "secure log on" or something like that. Maybe even the yahoo's would use it then?