Guilty until proven innocent

Well, today I found why downloads of Overseer have significantly dropped off lately. The problem, is IE and Google Chrome have been giving nasty ‘warnings’ about the clean Overseer setup exe, like these:

 

 

Wow– that sure discourages a person from downloading! No wonder my #’s have dropped… What did I do to deserve such slanderous ‘warning’ messages?  I’m not popular. I’m not iTunes. Overseer hasn’t been downloaded enough. That’s it. This is a “not popular” warning. Only those that are popular get this removed, and only those that get enough downloads get popular…How is someone supposed to get enough ‘reputation’ with IE ‘SmartScreen’ or whatever Google is using to actually remove this slanderous business-killing warning message?!?  The internet is supposed to be the great equalizer– hence net neutrality and all that, but this ‘technology’ clearly favors big business over the little guy.

My only solution for now was to provide some verbiage in big green text on the download page trying to calm the fears of my potential customers– hopefully that helps. I’m also getting a code signing certificate which might help– but people are saying the red warning dialog simply changes to a yellow warning dialog with a signed executable…

Even internal projects at Microsoft have been bitten by this ill-conceived technology.

It sure seems to be a bad time to be a small independent software vendor(ISV)…

 

UPDATE: I received my code signing certificate($365 for 5 years) and changed my build process to sign the installer exe and the exe’s inside. I just tested, and Chrome appears to have removed their warning when downloading Overseer. Unfortunately, IE still warns people when downloading or trying to run the installer– even though it’s clearly properly signed. Maybe MS will eventually change their mind, and realize I’m not such a bad guy after all…