Goodbye, Tucows Downloads: Program Down load Website Finally Retires
Don’t forget Tucows Downloads? The freeware and shareware downloads web-site is finally retiring.
“Tucows Downloads has experienced an remarkable run,” CEO Elliot Noss writes in a web site article. “We’re grateful to the thousands of computer software builders who used Tucows Downloads to get their application in front of tens of millions of persons, driving billions of downloads more than far more than 25 yrs.”
The services dates again to 1993, when the world-wide-web was continue to in its infancy. Again then, downloading purposes from the internet was nevertheless a novelty, and Tucows grew to become a top place for totally free and demo variations of software program.
The Tucows internet site in 1996. (Credit score: Internet Archive)
In a way, Tucows Downloads was an early app retail outlet. You could look for through hundreds of Windows, Mac, and Linux packages, study evaluations analyzing the program, and find suggestions. Nevertheless, the entire landscape for app downloads has improved with the arrival of Apple’s Application Retailer and Google’s dominance in web lookup, which can ferry you straight to a application developer’s internet site.
Given that then, Tucows’ small business design has shifted, turning the company much more into an internet infrastructure provider. It’s now the next largest domain registrar in the entire world behind GoDaddy, in accordance to Noss. “Point is, we’re holding occupied,” he states.
The Tucows Download site has remained online for sentimental, historic uses. “We talked about shutting the web site down right before. Most seriously in 2016 when as a substitute, we decided to go advert-no cost, trying to keep the internet site up as a public company,” he says.
So why shut it down now? In 2021, it really is way too a great deal of a stress to preserve up. “Tucows Downloads is old,” Noss says. “Old web-sites are a routine maintenance obstacle and for that reason a hazard. Retaining the Tucows Downloads website pulls folks away from the get the job done that moves our companies forward.”
Even with the closure, the Tucows Obtain web site will dwell on by way of the Online Archive, which has saved copies of the site’s web webpages going again to 1996.