Daring Fireball: How Should Mac Apps Be Distributed?

How Should Mac Apps Be Distributed?

Thursday, 17 September 2009

Alexander Limi has a thoughtful piece regarding the problems Mozilla has identified with the current installation process for Firefox on the Mac. As it stands, they’re following the common pattern of delivering the Firefox app on a disk image, which, when mounted, uses a background image and alias to the /Applications/ folder to encourage users to copy the app from the mounted image to their startup drive. Limi writes:

via daringfireball.net

I've always found the Mac's application install process to be stupid. It's very simple if you know what you're doing — certainly a step up from those painful multi-step Windows installers — but given that most people have no idea what a Disk image even is it's far more complicated than it needs to be.