The reason why Ninite dropped CCleaner, Defraggler and Recuva
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 12:30AM My favorite site to install essential free applications, ninite.com recently dropped Piriform's CCleaner, Defraggler and Recuva. For those unaware, ninite.com is an aggregate site that allows you to choose multiple programs to install at once. No crapware, just a simple automated installation of multiple applications. CCleaner is one of the best system cleaners around and now it is no more on ninite.com. The reason has finally come out, although previously suspected. Piriform asked that the programs be removed due to ninite's policy of not installing any secondary software with the program. Piriform is upset that you will not accidentally install one of the toolbars that accompanies the software. I say accidentally because most people do not read all of the screens when installing software, if they did, they would uncheck the screen telling you that some unwanted software is about to install along with the program you actually want. Kudos to ninite to not giving in.
Reader Comments (3)
Please provide screenshots to verify this... I have had to start installing Piriform programs manually a lot recently because of their removal from Ninite, and I haven't seen any hidden crapware or toolbars at all... They used to come packaged with Ask.com, but that was removed well over a year ago...
UPDATE: I just manually reinstalled CCleaner, Defraggler, and Recuva; they are 100% crap-free!
There is a lot of this hidden stuff in Piriform products now-a-days, but it's not the regular Bing Toolbar, Ask Toolbar, etc.
For the most part it's Google Chrome and/or Google Toolbar - and it's hidden inside a "Next"-dialog that for the most part could seem like a "Read this, this is nice to know", and the checkbox is partly invisible for a glancing eye. THAT is the problem.
Agreed, which is why Ninite is such a great site. Ninite allows you to bypass all the "drive-by downloads" that so many software vendors try to do. Unfortunately, so many of these companies are dependent on the money that Google and similar companies give them to survive, thus they play these games with hidden installs. It's sad, CCleaner is such a great program, it is a shame that they have made it such a pain to install and update.