Results with the other installers varied significantly. Adobe’s support site offers another tool,ĬS4 Clean Script, which is designed to remove this additional residue.

Yet it still left behind 501MB of data, including Adobe Media Player, portions of Acrobat Pro and InDesign, a few empty folders inside /Applications, and most of the newly added contents of ~/Library/Preferences. Adobe’s own uninstaller, which comes with CS4, removed far more of the files than any of the third-party tools did. The full install added 8.4GB of data to my disk, storing thousands of files in more than a dozen different locations. The good news: Almost without exception, uninstallers failed by leaving, not deleting, too much.įor example, take my experience with Adobe CS4. The dismaying result: No uninstaller removed all the pieces of the software packages I tested. It could also simply look for files with names containing the name of the application. It might also check an application’s bundle identifier-a string like -which often appears in the names of preferences and other support fies. If an application was installed using Apple’s Installer, the uninstaller might check for a receipt file (which lists all the files installed when the installer ran). Uninstallers use several techniques to decide which files to remove. Or an uninstaller might incorrectly guess that a given file belongs to an application you’re trying to delete, when in fact it belongs to another and/or contains essential, system-level data or preferences. If you use an uninstaller to remove just one of those programs, it may remove some of those shared components, and so disable the app you want to keep. For example, you may have two applications from the same developer, and they may share components. The opposite-and more serious-problem is when an uninstaller removes something it shouldn’t. However, problems could arise if residual components conflict with other software or are really large. In most cases, the consequences aren’t dire-there’s just a bit of disk space that you can’t use for something else.

However, there are two main reasons you might not want to use an uninstaller utility:

That’s why you might want to turn to a dedicated uninstaller. Some applications come their own uninstallers, but most don’t.

Best uninstaller for mac