14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most popular players on the market is targeted by a consumer advocacy group for the additional installs that it ads to its suite without letting users know about them. RealNetworks' RealPlayer has been known to be faulty in its latest releases and when another patched a hole, it created another.
The latest version, RealPlayer 11, automatically installs the Rhapsody Player Engine. If it had been only that, the problem wouldn't have caught the proportions it did. The boo-boo is that when you uninstall the player, the additional software remains on your computer and takes up hard space (yeah, it's not that big, but it counts) and, more importantly, processing power. I almost forgot about the eventual breaches in security that might appear in time with the RPE that you'd be automatically exposed to, without knowing it.
In RealNetworks' defense, the Rhapsody Player Engine is necessary in order to access the company's online music service, but be that as it may, letting users know about the install wouldn't have hurt. And it also wouldn't hurt to provide Firefox with the updated version, and a recommendation to remove RealPlayer 10.5 that the "Automatically install missing plugins" downloads.
The 10.5 version, if not registered on the producer's page, turns up a beautiful ad delivering Message Center. StopBadware.org, the consumer group that complains and that started the protest, says that: "It's installing, essentially, a piece of adware without giving users information about that up front." These two are an important statement on RealNetworks' policy towards users, not letting them know very much about what is really going on, according to Maxim Weinstein, StopBadware's manager.
The player's producing company says that these are merely oversights that will definitely be addressed in versions to come: "The fact that when you uninstall RealPlayer we don't go back and uninstall Rhapsody is an oversight and is something we should address in the future," Ryan Luckin, a spokesman at RealNetworks, told InfoWorld. At the same time, installing the 10.5 version and registering it would have told users that the Message Center would be installed, he said.