Oct 15 2007
Farewell, FileZilla
What used to be a fast, efficient FTP client for Windows is now a lame, crippled FTP client for Windows and Linux.
I used FileZilla all the time to transfer files to and from my website(s). And, weighing in at just over 3MB, it was a compact program, considering the number of features it supported.
But the developers of FileZilla just had to mess with it. For “version 3.0″ of the program, they decided to completely rewrite it from the ground up, for the sole purpose of making the program “cross-platform.” And so we see yet another example of great software going astray.
The obvious point is that Linux already has plenty of FTP clients! Anyone who uses Linux already has a favorite FTP client, and would not be eagerly anticipating the release of FileZilla for Linux, making the entire effort marginally useful.
And for Windows users, the rewrite of FileZilla came at a devastating price. The package now weighs in at over 10MB (unacceptable for a simple FTP client), and its user interface is now painfully sluggish, not to mention buggy, and actually less feature-rich than before.
Is “software bloat” an inevitable destination in the lifetime of a program? Like a red-giant star that expands when it runs out of fuel, is all useful software destined to end up a bloated monstrosity?
September 10th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
I have FileZilla 2.2 and never saw the need to get a new version. That’s the good thing about free software, much of it works fine if you don’t venture to replace it.
I suspect that bloat involves a few of these: security patches for Windows vulnerabilities; the ability to run in any of 110 languages; programmers who know better than you that you want bullets when you don’t and want a capital letter at the beginning of a line when you don’t.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
One last thought: anyone who had an Atari or Commodore with 64K (yes K) of RAM, you look at these 40MEG resident programs that live in your PC these days and say, wow, these people are out of control.