You would be surprised at how much cruft in Windows over the years has been directly due to Adobe. I had many bug triage sessions where Windows developers at Microsoft had to work around Adobe problems to keep Windows users happy. I always thought it was unfair and was quite impressed by Microsoft at their willingness to handle this so quietly.
In one of the comments on the page, a reader ran the analysis [1] on a windows installation and reports the bloat size.<p><i>Total bytes wasted: 5341278</i><p>[1] <a href="https://gist.githubusercontent.com/riverar/f4a56b91580af1bd3cf4dfacc3733bc3/raw/8f35e3def3173ded72c5715e5af37e830b2a639f/results.txt" rel="nofollow">https://gist.githubusercontent.com/riverar/f4a56b91580af1bd3...</a>
By the sounds of it, this bloat is minor. (Keep in mind, the author is pointing out the two most extreme examples.)<p>Bloat arises from a lot of different places, a lot of which cannot realistically be controlled without drastically affecting user expectations, system performance, and how software is developed.<p>Consider graphics. If you are quadrupling the color depth, you are quadrupling the amount of memory required for graphics resources. Even more fun, if you are doubling the resolution you are quadrupling the amount of memory required for graphics resources. Going back to the olden days would only be an option if they are willing to compromise on the quality of the graphics.<p>At the other end of the spectrum are developers. Should they really be choosing things like the type of an integer to reduce the size of code and data? Old software was often limited due to such considerations. In some cases software used bizarre tricks to reduce bloat, such as cramming data into the unused bits of an address. (Apparently that was common on 68000 based personal computers.)<p>Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of unnecessarily bloated software. Yet I suspect that the vast majority of that bloat exists for very good reasons.
It's not just Windows that is bloated; so is macOS, Android, and iOS. The wastefulness annoys me and I don't want to hear its okay because we have tons of disk space and RAM - it is still wasteful.<p>I understand why they kitchen-sink operating systems - its mainly so they can crow about new features when releasing new versions of the OS. But I wish they would offer alternate installs for those of us who are proficient.
It's not the first time Windows has shipped with shameful metadata. For example, a .wav file shipped with Windows XP appears to be authored with a pirated version of SoundForge: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060721090521/http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-11183-0.html?forumID=89&threadID=173539&messageID=1765547" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20060721090521/http://techrepubl...</a>
It's great investigative work into Windows binaries, and I hope it gets addressed for the sake of people's disk space, but I think the tone is too harsh and overstated.<p>Example: He cites effects on startup time - but has he considered the existence of virtual memory? When explorer.exe loads and maps the bloat into address space, it doesn't need it in RAM until the first page fault accessing it which likely will not even happen.
Given this bloat resides in the metadata of PNG assets exported from Photoshop, couldn't this affect any operating system?<p>How many applications on Mac OS utilize PNG assets which were exported from Photoshop without any further optimization?
I can't comment on this issue, but if you want to get an idea of how a company can take over an excellent software and ruin it making it beefier and slower, just take a look at the wonderful snappy gem that was Cool Edit Pro and what it became after being morphed into Adobe Audition.
shameless plug: you can throw a windows pe file (exe, dll, etc.) at leanify and it will remove all the garbage in pngs in that pe file (even those embedded pngs in high res ico file in pe file), and it will also optimize png compression with zopfli.
But don't use it on windows system files because modifying those pe files will definitely break the digital signature.
Is it feasible to remove this junk yourself, or will the system freak out about hacked binaries? Would it also complain if I just applied to the PNG files?
Egad that XML is horrible! Whoever thought that could possibly be a sane format?<p>And to repeat it over and over — it's like a boot stomping on disk space, forever.
I remember an article saying that making a trivial change to Windows requires 5 minutes to change the code and 2 weeks to deal with the aftermath (testing/...)<p>I wonder how easy it actually is to remove this XMP metadata, considering that it could potentially break some application which loads a PNG directly from explorer.exe with a broken PNG parser or something.
Which is funny, because all of the things I hate about Microsoft and Windows have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they provide bloated binaries, containing PNG images that are bundled with extra XML tags and descriptors.<p>Gee whiz! What a world!