Techlines Today

CNET’s Top 10 downloads of the past 10 years

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 8, 2005 ⋅

CNET has released their version of the top 10 downloads of the past 10 years.

#1 ICQ. ICQ was the first instant messenger program if I recall correctly. At the time of its release, I was a heavy IRC user. As such, I just did not see the fascination with ICQ and the IM wave. Interesting, because today, I can’t remember the last time I have been on IRC, and can’t imagine not using IM in my day to day activities. Not ICQ mind you, but I probably have a 5 digit userid if anyone is interested?

#2 Winamp. The king daddy of Windows MP3 players. It wasn’t my first player, those at the beginning of the MP3 saga may recall another player, though for the life of me I can’t remember. You will just have to take my word for it! Winamp is no long my player of choice (refer to another program in this list), it certainly remains a fantastic media player. My first mp3 ever: Dishwalla – Counting Blue Cars (112kbps).

#3 Napster. Fittingly, Napster and Winamp are coupled closely together. Napster was the first program to introduce the concept of Peer 2 Peer networking for filesharing, atleast MP3. I am proud to say my account was one of the ones Metallica had Napster shutdown, even though I owned every Metallica album at the time! I was too lazy to rip to mp3 (computers weren’t so fast then, P166MMX baby!) and got caught. I’m sooo bad.

#4 Firefox. This amazes me. In my opinion, this is the best browser out there. What is amazing to me, Firefox is a relatively newcomer on the Internet and still ranks in at a solid #4.

#5 WinZip. This program needs to be ranked a lot higher. You would be hard pressed to find someone that has never used Winzip. Before Winzip, we were stuck with the commandline PKWare/PKZip. If I recall correctly, the first few versions of Winzip were nothing more than interface wrappers around PKWare’s zip implementation. Someone correct me? I know longer use Winzip however; I’ve moved on to Filzip, mainly because it is free.

#6 iTunes. Gee, does anyone else think MP3′s were a big deal for the past 10 years? Three programs so far that are directly related to this codec. I use iTunes, and yes, its a bloated pig on Windows, with horrendous multithreading; but its iPod integration cannot be beat.

#7 Ad-aware. Lavasoft’s free spyware detection and cleaning program was probably the first of its kind, atleast that I had heard of. I still think it is one of the best out there, but sometimes the best protection involves doubling up. You need this software installed.

#8 Skype. OK, the first program I have never actively used on the list. It’s VOIP software allowing free calls over the Internet to other Skype users as well as POTs calls for a low low fee. I use Vonage, thanks.

#9 Realplayer. I’m stuck in a rut, I rarely use this program and in fact, it is not even installed currently. It was revolutionary at the time of its release however, allowing the streaming of content, audio first and then later video, over the Internet. Today, its just a bloated peice ‘o poo. Flame me!

#10 Acrobat. Adobe Acrobat is the defacto Internet publishing format standard, popular because of its write once, read many mantra. Documents could be exchanged freely without fear of manglement or font nightmares between computers.

So there you have it. Unsurprisingly, I don’t agree with the list. ICQ is too high, Winzip too low. I question whether Skype should be on the list, but I guess that CNET is ranking the applications based on the number of downloads over a 10year period? VOIP is hot, maybe that explains it. I think maybe Netscape should be on the list somewhere, as well as the HUGELY popular Doom shareware. But what do I know?