So I needed to open a .pdf file but I forgot that I recently formatted my hard drive, so off I went to download the latest Acrobat Reader. 6.0, I thought it was.
Nope - it’s at version 7.0 now, and the goddamn installer is 27 MB. 27! But I needed to view the document, so I went ahead and downloaded the installer. Or so I thought, because after I downloaded the installer it immediately downloaded another installer. THEN it installed something called Adobe Photoshop Album before finally installing Reader 7.0.
Looking at my Desktop, I have the following new icons: ytb01_efgsip.exe (483 KB), psa2011se_us (6.49 MB), AdbeRdr70_enu_ful.exe (19.1 MB) and finally a shortcut to the Reader program itself. No shortcut to the Photoalbum program, though there is a listing for it in Add/Remove Programs. PLUS it adds a file to startup.ini. At no time during any part of this process was I given the option to customize, add or remove components.
According to Control Panel, Adobe Acrobat Reader takes up 61 MB of freaking space. Jesus. Remember when Acrobat Reader was only 6 MB or so four years ago? How fucking complicated does a viewer program need to be?
Not at all, apparently, since an outfit called Foxit managed to make a generic .pdf viewer that’s less than 1 MB. I’m using it now to view my document just fine.
Thanks for that Foxit recommendation. I’d forgotten how bloated Acrobat Reader had become, but when I installed Foxit, I was shocked to be looking at a pdf within seconds as opposed to within a minute. Great little app.
Oh noes! All of 61 MB for an application in a day and age where hard disks with 100+ GB are common, and a single game takes up 1-3 gigs! Get a grip, people. It’s the year 2005, stop counting bits on your HD…
Well, to be fair, I don’t really care about the hard drive space. The issue for me is that if I click on a PDF, I just want to see it, not watch a minute long boot-up screen and then have Adobe check every piece of Adobe software on my system, then check the Interne for updates, then ask me if I want to update them, then finally chunk its way through the PDF. There’s some software on a machine which really should be as speedy and no-frills as possible and I think document/image viewers are one of them.
Granted, but you can disable those annoying auto-checks, and loading is only slow the first time after a reboot. I don’t have version 7.0 but version 6.0 only takes 2-3 seconds to load on my system if it was started & closed before. I think you could also trim the plug-in list (most people won’t need those plug-ins for enterprise document sharing) but I never bothered doing that.
Yeah, well, Acrobat Reader is free… Adobe makes money on the full Acrobat software which is geared towards enterprise use these days. Full support for Asian languages, annotating documents with suggestions, tracking changes, embedded multimedia etc. They probably don’t dare disable or omit any of these features in the free download lest their precious enterprise customers try looking at their precious enterprise documents and find that the reader doesn’t work properly.
Would be nice if they offered a separate download for non-enterprise users, though…
The download I got on Adobe let me get the “slim” version of Reader 7.0. I opted out of the Photoshop Album and the other thing.
Reader 7.0 now also loads as fast as a pdf does on the Mac. (For the Mac ignorant, pdf is built into the OS X gui, so pdfs open practically instantly.) Of course, there’s a new program in your startup folder to accomodate that on the PC.
Oh noes! All of 61 MB for an application in a day and age where hard disks with 100+ GB are common, and a single game takes up 1-3 gigs! Get a grip, people. It’s the year 2005, stop counting bits on your HD…
What kind of comment is that? I have a 150MB hard drive so I can put MORE programs on them, not fill it up with newer versions of programs I already have. That’s senseless.
Besides, if the latest Reader really offered 61MB of actual features instead of bloated routines that took up more space, I might not complain. But compared to the bare bones Foxit that’s 1/61 the size of Adobe 7.0 that offers the feature I really need (the ability to view .pdf files - duh!) I don’t see that happening.
Hey, maybe he really meant down. Maybe if you really were down in the bathroom and you couldn’t get up, you would need a friend to come in and wipe your ass. I don’t know. I’ve never been in that predicament, but I’m just saying you might.
