"This is the problem: You want to open a file using something other than the default application. You right-click its icon in the Finder, choose Open With, and a submenu pops up with an absurd number of duplicate entries." This is so annoying. Dr. Dang made a little addition to .bashrc so you can fix it with a single command. Now it's up to Apple to actually fix the problem (via Daring Fireball).
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Member since:2011-05-12
My guess is the difference between Windows/Linux and OS X is that OS X doesn't seem to have some kind of database system that holds information of installed software and a lot of applications don't have an installer, but are installed by drag 'n' drop.
If an app doesn't check if a previous version already inserted itself in to the "open with" menu it will probably add itself too, causing a duplicate.
Windows and Linux do work with installers, uninstallers and know what is installed.
Member since:2008-07-15
Installers, or the lack there of, aren't in and of themselves the issue. I've seen Windows installers that do far worse than have duplicates in the open with menu (Adobe, I'm looking at you). I've even seen some several years back that created double start menu entries because, rather than check for proper lnk files, they simply created duplicates so you had "Adobe Acrobat.lnk" and "Adobe Acrobat (1).lnk", both of which showed up in the menu as "Adobe Acrobat." I've seen Linux packages do similar things, though not recently. I haven't really encountered these issues on any os for at least a year, and I'm sure not complaining, but it's hardly a Mac-specific issue. No matter what the installation system, clumsy developers will eventually cause problems like this.
Member since:
2007-03-26
I didn't say it did. It was just a (bad) joke post
Yeah, I know how "open with" works.
It would be better if OS X didn't do that at all. KDE and -as far as I can remember- Windows doesn't create duplicate entries. And I don't mean that as flamebait because all OS's / desktop environments have their own quirks (it's to be expected given the complexity of such software). I just mean that running additional processes every week to catch a bug that should be caught when new entries are being added seems like the wrong approach - which I'm guessing is the reason why Apple have never implemented a weekly job.
Edited 2013-02-20 12:04 UTC