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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:
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.