Microsoft recently released a free “RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP”. Sounds good, you might think - just what a serious photographer needs!
Then you notice that it only supports images from Canon and Nikon cameras. Maybe not quite so good then.
Assume you have a Canon or Nikon camera; you decide to go ahead with the download. Only then do you notice the size of the file: 47.7 MB. Surely some mistake? After all, the superb IrfanView image viewer comes in at just 875 KB - that’s 56 times smaller. And IrfanView supports raw images from at least 11 manufacturers, as well as almost every other graphics format under the sun - and it’s also free.
No, the download really is 47.7 MB. You’ve probably already guessed that the “RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP” uses .NET, so inclusion of the .NET runtime probably accounts for about 22 MB of this bulk.
But what about the other 25 MB? What justification is there for this huge download? How does the hapless user gain from these millions of bytes of code?
Microsoft clearly has an almost religious attachment to .NET, but I can’t help thinking they’ve totally lost the plot.