With 35 years IT experience, my comment on this forum of three years ago remains as valid today as then - that WD makes great/reliable hard drives, but appears absolutely hopeless at producing robust high-level software…
On Win7 I go to www.wd2go.com and log-in successfully and see my two MyBookLive units. But if I click on either of them, my MS Windows software prevents me from running the ‘unsafe’ Java app to open them. I’m using Win7 and Firefox browser and the error message is “This plug-in has security vulnerabilities” and if you click to open Java details, it advises that the secutiry certificate is out of date. It does not allow one to override, but keeps one permanently unable to open the WD shares, by virtue of the out-of-date certificates.
The reason I need to go in as Administrator is because both WD NAS systems can no longer be seen as ‘network shares’ by the WD Media unit (WDlive), and are too stupid to decide to do database rebuilds on their own, but must be manually prompted by Admin to do so. The shares are still there for a computer to see, but WD’s own supposed ‘mating’ devices cannot see WD’s NAS drives.
When I now look for software updates, MyBook drives etc are listed on WD product list, but MyBookLive seems to have been dropped from WD’s own list of products. This seems to be a symptom of trying to have too many products. It might be that WD could keep their products working, if they did not so ‘splinter’ their products into too many sub-categories at the request of marketing.
Before buying a handful of WD NAS products, my original plan was to keep using an older low-spec PC as a SAMBA share under Linux, to hang drives off. The WD solution ‘looked simpler’ as it avoided having to keep another PC updated (albeit just Linux auto-updates). Now that I have complete lock-out from all the WD devices (ie not a problem of any individual one), the original Linux SAMBA shares looks like the easier route.
So, to test if one NEEDS to use MS more proprietary Internet Explorer’s browser to access WD products, I went to WD2GO.com using IE. This allows you to log-in and also (second) login to drive [btw, why the **bleep** have two separate logins?] then when you click on one of the devices, you are automatically re-directed to Oracle Technet page with 40+ different product downloads available… Java SE, Java ME, Java SE8 update 5, Java SE7 rel55, etc etc, with no clue provided by either the MD webpage, or the Oracle webpage to which MD redirected the user, as to which Java product download one might need to actually use WD2GO. This is a nightmare in terms of user interface. There is nothing wrong with using Java as a tool - it is pointing the user at a myriad of options with no explanation as to which option to pursue that is the problem.
But why would WD not support Mozilla industry-standard Firefox browser? Or should this fact be made clear up-front, so that people who have a commitment to industry standard offerings would know to stay away? Or if users need to upgrade to some other form of Java that may not already be on their Win7 computer, by way of normal updates, why not tell them in a WD-interface webpage what they must do to continue to use WD2GO. It seems that no-one inside WD has sat like a user in userland and seen just how hopeless the user interface really is…
