Shoutbox

Nathalie, in all fairness:

quote:

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Originally posted by Nathalie
The online installer is industry standard

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A 'standard' which is seriously frowned upon by many people.
Yes, that type of wrapper and installer is used in many other software packages, but most have questionable motives and most of that (shareware) software is of bad quality. Ask any computer user with some knowledge on the matter and they will all say the same thing.
So, I wont call that a 'standard' at all!
Often (mis)used, yes, but certainly not a 'standard' at all.

quote:

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Originally posted by Nathalie
and actually weighs less than an offline one.

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That is maybe one of the biggest misconceptions!!!
Online installers are usefull for only a very small percentage of users and only when such installers let you choose a wide variaty of packages (eg: like MS Office offers many different stuff which you don't necessarily need) and when it would otherwise be an installer of like 200MB or something. Only THEN it might be usefull.

But for Plus! it is of no use at all!
Plus! is one package, so everything needs to be downloaded anyways, no matter what. It is also still small enough to be downloaded as one package. (granted, there are still people on very slow connections, but that point is completely mute since they need to download everything anyways with the online installer!!!!)

Moreover, there are more problems with such online installers (eg: hard to rollback to a previous version, for whataver reasons, problems with proxies, like nephilim123 said, high on maintenance, hard to debug, hard to keep track of) than that they would solve anything at all.

And even if other companies use online installers, they ALL also provide a complete package as an offline installer too!

The only thing online installers, in a situation like Plus!, might have over offline installers is that you minimize the load on your servers more since people who don't want to install, wont download the complete thing (although that isn't entirly true either since your online installer already starts to download stuff even if the user hasn't actually started the install procedure).

quote:

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Originally posted by Nathalie
The installation process is transparent so that you can opt in or out.

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Are you saying that all the problems with the browser addons, the automatically changing browser settings (also the massive problem that the Plus! Windows Service ignores the user's opt in/out choice) and what not, are all solved now?