When Does a Program Become Bloatware?

Bloatware is a issue that is overlooked by some developers. It’s when a program has too much features that the purpose of the program is difficult to find. Take the program I made in the image for example (I would never release a program like this), can you really find the main purpose of the program? I made this program for word processing. The problem is that this program does so many other things that it really isn’t a word processor anymore, it’s now a word processor that browses the web, shows resource usage, displays photos, etc.. It really can’t do anything perfectly. Now why would you want a program that does so many things badly over a program that does one thing well?

Bloatware is much more common in desktop applications than mobile applications. The thing is that with mobile applications, there really isn’t much room to make a program that does multiple things. On my iPod, I have a separate application for web browsing, viewing photos, listening to music, etc.. simply because the screen is too small to have other functions besides the main function. But on a desktop program such as Firefox, I can have multiple functions using add-ons and extensions, simply because there’s space for those functions. But there are times when desktop applications only perform one function; take Tweetie for Mac by atebits for example , it only lets you post to and read your Twitter.

David – Senior Editor

Tags: applications, bloatware, c#, desktop, mobile, programming, vb, web browser

This entry was posted on July 21, 2010 at July 21, 2010 and is filed under Rant, programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.