Bad GOMplayer!

I’ve been updating my old laptop after not using it for a couple of months and one program that told me it had a new version was the excellent GOM player, my choice of media player under Windows. Happily I clicked on “yes please, download the update” and sat back.

Down it came, install started, answered the usual questions and then hit a new screen. Do I want the Ask Toolbar? And to change my default search engine to Ask? And to have my homepage set to Ask?

Well, no. I don’t. I also don’t like the fact that agreeing to the license is the same choice as agreeing to have the Ask toolbar installed. Of course, by now you’ve downloaded and installed the software so you’ve overwritten your old version. So unless you have the install file for that, you’re screwed.

Only you’re not. Fortunately there’s an “out” although whether by accident or design, I don’t know. I simply unchecked all the boxes and hit “Cancel” which – to my surprise – didn’t roll back the install. Instead, it opened Internet Explorer (itself strange as it’s not my default browser) on the download page for the Russian version of GOM.

And that was it.

So very, very bad form from GOM. A warning that the license has changed and toolbars are going to be enforced should be mentioned before download / install. Alternatively, there should be an option not to install the toolbar while still using the software/ Many other programs manage this, so GOM should as well.

It’s still my preferred media player, but only as long as I can skip around it installing bloody search bars. Mind you, if it only installs it on IE – which seems the case – I could almost put up with it on the basis that I never use IE anyway.