Freeware Sites For Mac

• Download Sites For Mac Software

It’s been more than a year since we drew attention to the crapware regularly foisted upon unsuspecting users by, including. Since then, a few sites–including SourceForge themselves–have started cleaning up their act. Most freeware download sites still use shady tactics, unfortunately, cramming their own installers full of unwanted software and misleading advertisements down your throat in order to make a buck. But now that a few are getting better, we wanted to give credit where credit is due–so consider this an ongoing list of sites that have made things right.

Download Sites For Mac Software

SourceForge’s New Owners Cleaned It Up At the end of January 2016, was sold to a company named BIZX, LLC. The new owners immediately, terminating the controversial “DevShare” program that wrapped open-source installers in junkware, sometimes against the wishes of their developers. “We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that.

We’re more interested in doing the right thing than making extra short-term profit,” they wrote in their announcement. SourceForge appears to be a trustworthy place to download open-source software from once again. The second most important problem–misleading “Download” buttons that push you to third-party websites offering open-source project installers wrapped in junkware–also appears to have improved.

We haven’t seen any of those ads on the new SourceForge. Tucows Saw the Light is another old freeware download site that succumbed to the temptation of packing its installers with junkware. Back when we examined a variety of download sites, we called the Tucows software download site “an abomination that should be removed from the Internet” and found that it was probably worse than even Download.com. On May 3, 2016, that it, too, was done with that practice. Tucows isn’t just a software download site–the company also makes money from selling domain names, cell phone service, and fiber Internet.

CNET Download.com is your best guide to find free downloads of safe, trusted, and secure Mac software, utilities, and games.

“For a while, we were struggling to walk away from the revenue,” Tucows’ Michael Goldstein told us. “But we’ve been growing like crazy the last couple of years (from wonderful customer-focused, subscription services) and we realized it’s no longer worth the money to be associated with that nonsense. We considered just shutting the download site off but decided it felt more right to keep it running (with just a fraction of people’s time here) as a sort of public service.” So there you have it: Tucows doesn’t offer the junk anymore.

There’s just a small bit of advertising for other Tucows services, like domain registration. Download.com Abandons Its Installer RELATED: Download.com finally sometime in early 2016, although it did this without any public announcement.

You can now visit Download.com and you’ll get direct links to download programs without any additional junkware. This website still has a little ways to go, however. We’d like to see them clean up their advertising and getting rid of ads with misleading green “Download” buttons that encourage visitors to click the wrong thing. But Download.com deserves credit for abandoning its much-hated installer.

FossHub and Ninite Remain Excellent While we’re at it, we should highlight a few high-quality freeware download sites that never sold out their users, too. Is an excellent download site that many projects switched to when they were abandoning SourceForge. It’s a download hosting site for free and open-source software (or “FOSS”).

FossHub has never bundled any junkware with its downloads. Download pages just have a single unobtrusive advertisement to help pay the bills–that’s it. FossHub remains trustworthy site. RELATED: is also great.

For awhile, it was, and nothing’s changed there. Among the big general freeware download sites, Ninite was the only one that won’t try to force junk onto your computer–after all, FossHub is just for open-source software. Ninite offers an especially useful tool to quickly download and install software on a new PC, and it has never bundled junkware. Ninite even lets you install software that normally includes its own, developer-added junkware and skips it for you. For example, you can use Ninite to install Java without it offering.

These aren’t the only places you can download software safely, of course. Many software projects offer downloads on their own websites and these downloads can be clean, although many software projects make money by adding junkware to their own downloads. RELATED: is generally fine–for open-source projects hosted on GitHub, you can download the latest software builds without any junkware.

But GitHub is more about code hosting, and the download experience for users who aren’t developers isn’t as user-friendly. For big freeware download sites, FossHub, Ninite, SourceForge, and Tucows seem to be the ones that aren’t out to get you.

We’d love to see more download sites follow SourceForge and Tucows, but they’ll need business models that allow them to make money without “.” This list may look small now, but hopefully this trend continues, and more sites start cleaning up their acts and doing what’s best for their users. Our goal is to keep this list up to date, so if and when more sites cut the crap(ware), we’ll add them to this post. So stay tuned.

Today we are listing here Top 10 Free Software Download Sites. There are many other sites are available for software download, but I just tried to list down some very popular sites that I like most. I hope these sites can help you to find and download the software you want to have with you. All of them are huge sites and full of useful software collection that you might looking for.

You are welcome if you want to share more useful useful sites to download free software that we have missed here and you think our readers/viewers may like. At SmashingApps.com just and as well.