Some Windows system files are cluttered with Adobe metadata.


    The share of Adobe XMP garbage in the system files Explorer.exe and ApplicationFrame.dll

    The size of Windows system files increased from 250-350 MB in Windows 98 to 700-800 MB in Windows XP, and then to 10-15 GB in Windows 7 and continues to grow. If you wondered why the Windows 10 distribution takes up so much disk space, and the system consumes so much RAM (compared to Linux), then know that a small, very small part of the blame lies with Adobe. It was Adobe that developed and promotes the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) technology , which inflates file size (for example, PNG), and then these bloated PNG files are included in the Windows system binary.

    The share of XMP is small in the total distribution of Windows 10 (only 5341271 extra bytes), although in some files a significant part is occupied with unnecessary metadata. And these are not some digital signatures from the Sound Forge cracked program, with which the system WAV files for Windows 95 were created , but completely unnecessary and uninformative PNG metadata.

    What is Adobe XMP? Simply put, this is a metadata platform that allows you to cram a variety of information into PNG, GIF, JPEG, PSD, TIFF and many other file formats. The platform itself allows different programs to exchange data via XMP. That is, one program can save there, for example, a color profile, and another program will retrieve it. These containers embed various headers, identifiers, GPS coordinates, color information, and more.

    Usually XMP is represented by constructs from a subset of the RDF model, which in turn is usually serialized as XML. Unfortunately, many users unknowingly inflate the sizes of graphic files and fill them with Adobe XMP junk when saving files. Just in some programs, these are the default save settings. For example, these are the default settings in Adobe Photoshop.

    In XML format, this data takes up quite a lot of space. In addition, they consume CPU resources when parsing XML during file processing.



    Windows 10 programmer and user Rafael Rivera (Rafael Rivera) became interested in: how much is actually Adobe XMP garbage in different files? To answer this question, he wrote the eoraptor utility , the source code of which is published on Github.

    Rafael says he was very surprised when the program found a huge amount of XMP junk even in the Windows 10 system files! He did not write a program to analyze this brainchild of Microsoft, but to quickly study graphic files. But it turned out that Microsoft developers are not sinless - and they inject unnecessary information even into system files!

    For example, system Explorer (Windows Explorer), which is loaded into memory when the operating system starts, consists of as much as 20% of garbage. Or take another system file ApplicationFrame.dll, which is also loaded into memory at system startup - it is responsible for the headers and borders of application windows. Unnecessary XML content in it occupies 41% of the total library volume!

    Rafael Rivera writes that the contents of XMP inevitably penetrate into the various system components associated with graphics, image viewers and related components.

    This problem seems trivial, but in fact shows some non-optimized operating system. The extra components in the system files slightly affect all aspects of the OS performance: load time, image size and disk space after the installation, system updates, validation when executing Authenticode digital signature files, etc. What is typical Microsoft has a department that optimizes Windows performance. In theory, this should be in his area of ​​expertise. These are the things that they should keep track of.

    Microsoft can quite quickly and simply rectify the situation by simply compressing all the PNG images that are included in the system files. Fortunately, there are many utilities that optimize PNGs without losing quality, effectively removing unnecessary metadata from there. Perhaps the company will carry out such optimization and update the system files with the nearest build.

    And now we have to admit that the work on optimizing the operating system at Microsoft was not at the highest level, or the developers have some reason to keep the XMP metadata in the system files. Perhaps they should take an example from their colleagues from the Microsoft Edge browser development team. They have already optimized all the files: got rid of excess garbage in PNG using PNGDistill, and then further compressed binaries using the Google ZopFli algorithm .

    Microsoft Internet Explorer program manager Eric Lawrence recently talked about optimization.

    Each site owner can save traffic by simply processing their PNG files with the PNGDistill utility (a module in Python ).
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