The new, spankingly webby, 2.0 Joost is good - well done there. A far cry from the incessantly buggy and severely UI challenged application that was its predecessor (which surprisingly attracted £20m and more VC funding).
I have one problem (well, more, but am trying to stay focussed) with it, however, and it’s a pretty huge one. Joost’s innocuous browser “plugin”.
Now, internet plugins, so history tells, were invented as very simple add on to browsers to give them access to additional functionality. Stuff like getting Quicktime to open a movie file or Acrobat to display a PDF.
The Joost version is an entirely different beast, most noticably in the fact that it continues to operate even when a web browser is not running. That is one very confused plugin and, to me, behavior reminiscent of a very bad Trojan program.
Joost need the plugin because it delivers video using peer to peer technology. Fine. I’ve no problem with it running whilst I’m using the service. Contribute, share etc. I have a bit of an issue with it running when I’m using a web browser for all the stuff you use a browser for. Running when there is no browser open is, frankly, unacceptable.
And it gets worse. You can turn it off manually but, if you ever visit the Joost website again, it turns itself on again. Invisibly. And stays on until you restart or do the manual thing again. That’s bad.
Joost might have some legitimate reasons to keep a process live. They should tell us what they are. Maybe they need some idea of the network of users or how much potential p2p bandwidth is available. But we’re talking significant CPU usage here - it idles around 2 - 4% on my 2.4Ghz laptop but I’ve seen it at 10% several times. All with the browser closed.
Needless to say, I’ve deleted the damn thing off my machine. Which is bad for Joost at a crucial turning point in their business model. | know they’ve said they will have a plugin free version available soon but why that wasn’t released first I don’t know. Maybe someone should tell them that the web is a very different beast from the kind of custom, closed environments like Skype that they’ve built huge success on in the past?
