I was a really a big fan (emphasis on ‘was’) of FlashGet. I mean, come on, this little guy has everything — download management, acceleration, scheduling, BitTorrent, and even eMule! Even more — it easily integrates with Firefox and Internet Explorer by installing a little-addon which also works seamlessly with FlashGot.

Until it updated today to 3.4…

I mean, take a look at this screenshot:

A Screenshot of Flashget 3.4

What do you see? RIGHT. The one thing everybody hates about absolutely anything on the internet. The new FlashGot screen (though I gotta admit, the new silver-theme is smexy) is riddled with ads. Chinese Ads. Not only that. A Flash-like ad also appears ocassionally on your desktop, that’s right, outside the FlashGet screen.

I personally think this is waaay too much. This is overkill. And did I forget to mention that it also places a couple of Chinese URL links on your desktop?

Meh, I think I’ll try Free Download Manager or Orbit now.

UPDATE: Wow, apparently, FlashGet 3.4 isn’t even downloadable from its website yet! This probably means that only the users who already have it installed received the update. Strange enough, when I uninstall, the uninstaller from first to last was in total Chinese.

UPDATE 2: According to commenter Wommaster, the language on FlashGet 3.4 is Chinese, not Japanese. Thanks Wommaster!

UPDATE 3: I’ve written a guide on how to uninstall it completely and remove all traces of it, and then how to downgrade. See it here: http://kixtrix.com/2010/04/07/flashget-followup-uninstalling-and-downgrading-3-4/