Safe Disposal of…Software?

Q: How do I uninstall software?

A: If you’ve wondered this, you’re not alone. This is a question I’ve gotten from countless people, particularly those who have recently started using a Mac after years in a Windows world. In Windows, you generally need to locate the “Uninstall Executable” - an application that uninstalls the software for you - for the software you’re ready to get rid of.

So, what’s the secret in OS X?

The short answer is: find the application, drag it to your trash, empty the trash. End of story - no hooplah.

As you’d expect, this does come with a few caveat emptors. Sometimes, an application lives in a folder with a lot of other stuff. Take the folder here that has Adobe Reader:

Most of the other applications here, like Calculator, just have a single icon, but Adobe Reader has a folder and another file associated with it. In this case it’s only one file, but sometimes there might be many more. When uninstalling an application like this, it’s a good idea to drag the entire folder to the trash (or right-click and select “Move to Trash”). This helps to keep your hard drive and Applications folder from being cluttered with stuff that you’re no longer using, and also makes sure that nothing that is related to the application you’re uninstalling hangs around to give you headaches later on.

One exception to this would be, if there are multiple applications in a single folder and you only want to uninstall one of them. In that case, you’re better off uninstalling just the single application by dragging it to the trash than deleting the entire folder.

Another thing you’ll notice in the Adobe Reader folder is the ReadMe.html file. If you see a file with this name, it’s a good idea to take it at face value - read it. If there are any tricks you need to know about an application, including things you might need to do for uninstalling, you’ll likely find them documented in this file. (If you see a User’s Guide or Manual in the folder, you can check there, too.) Open it up by double clicking, look through the file to make sure that there’s nothing special you need to do. Then you can delete in good faith.

One final caveat to keep in mind. What do you do if you’re looking through an application’s folder for ReadMe files and find this instead:

When I look in the Flip4Mac application folder, I learn that it does have an installer! You could probably still just drag this to the trash and delete it, and odds are decent that you’d still be ok…but why gamble? Sometimes an application will alter other things on your computer when you install it. In this case, an uninstaller’s job is to put everything back the way it was to begin with. If you do happen to find an uninstaller when you’re looking around to see whether an application has a folder or just an icon, it’s generally a good idea to go ahead and use it.

So, to conclude: If the application is just a single icon, or an icon in a folder that doesn’t contain an uninstaller, you can just drag it (or its folder) to the trash and delete it. If there’s a ReadMe file or User’s Guide that tells you to do something differently, go with what it tells you to do. In the rare event that you do find an uninstaller packaged with the application, that’s your safest bet.

Postscript: In the comments below, Judy makes a good point when she asks about preference files.

In general, you’re ok just leaving the preference files where they are and not worrying about them. Most Mac software is pretty good about playing nicely and not messing around with a lot of other stuff on your computer, so the preference files really only affect applications you’re using, and you obviously aren’t using a deleted application

Sometimes people wonder whether they might be able to get back a lot of disk space by deleting preference files. The short answer is: no. Unless you’re installing and uninstalling software frequently (and I mean, really frequent), preference files aren’t going to take up a lot of space. For example, my Preferences folder on my MacBook Pro is about 2.5 Megabytes, or about 0.001667% of my 150 Gigabyte hard drive. If you were so inclined, you could burn 280 copies of the entire folder to one CD.

One main reason you might want to delete preference files is if an application starts behaving badly. This could be a sign of a corrupted preference file, which is easily solved by deleting the preference file and re-doing the preferences for the application. If people are curious, I can go over that in a column sometime in the future!