What happens after the click? You see this:Īgain with the giant blue “Download” button! And this time it’s even higher up on the page than the real download button, which makes it even more likely that non-technical users will be tricked into clicking it. Now assume that you have somehow managed to find the correct link to click, and clicked it. We know that people don’t read online, so a text link is always going to be “seen” by the user after they’ve noticed the graphical elements. But that link is visually swamped by the two huge ad units below it, each of which features a giant blue button labeled “DOWNLOAD”. The answer is the link in the middle right, under “Get it now (free download)”. Here is what I saw when I went there today:Īt first glance, where would you think you should click to download the Paint.NET software? Imagine that you were telling me you needed an image editor, and I, helpful geek that I am, told you to go to to download Paint.NET. And worse, it’s possible that the software is not innocuous that it’s spyware, or malware, or some other nasty thing. Even if the unrelated software is completely innocuous, it’s still being distributed to users under false pretenses. And then the user, thinking they are installing Paint.NET, double-clicks the downloaded installer and gets that completely unrelated software onto their machine. And those ads are designed in such a way as to lead naïve users to believe clicking the ad will download Paint.NET, when in actuality it causes some other, completely unrelated software to be downloaded.

The problem is this: the Paint.NET web site runs ads from Google’s ad network. I have frequently recommended it to Windows users who needed an inexpensive, lightweight graphics tool.īut this post isn’t about Paint.NET, really. Paint.NET is an excellent, free, easy-to-use image editing program for Microsoft Windows. Google and Paint.NET need to stop misleading users

Download getpaint net