Adobe Acrobat is a Joke

   By chris on July 4th 2008 in /dev/random | 1,392 views

I had to laugh this morning when I woke up and starting reading about Adobe’s new Acrobat 9. Adobe seems hell-bent on taking a great format (PDF) and epitomizing the worst of all things bloatware with it.

On Windows:

After the unpacking, the install process itself took 10 minutes. I could only thank Adobe’s engineers, presuming they were filling up my hard drive with yummy icons, tasty DLLs, and amazing 3D JavaScript add-ons. No matter — the 210 MB it required was there to be used.

On Mac OS:

System requirements call for Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later, G4 or later (including Intel), 128MB RAM, 405MB hard disk space and Safari 2.0.4 or later.

One fifth of a gig and half a gig, respectively. Are you serious?

I urge you to forget Acrobat ever existed, and on the Mac this is easy to do. Use Preview (a svelte 64.2 MB) to read your PDFs and us the Print command to produce them. Use Safari to browse, it renders PDFs natively without the need for Adobe’s Acrobat plugin.

Just say “No” to Adobe’s “your computer is our garbage dump” approach to software.

Update Gus Mueller decomposes the Acrobat 9 installer and Mark Pilgrim imagines an Acrobat-induced dystopia.

5 Responses to “Adobe Acrobat is a Joke”

  1. Aaron responded on 04 Jul 2008 at 5:34 pm #

    I’ve always hated Acrobat but I generally like Adobe’s other products (including the stuff they got when they bought Macromedia).

    I just try to pretend Acrobat (and the horrible, horrble Adobe Updater) are by some renegade company that just pretends to be Adobe.

  2. chris responded on 04 Jul 2008 at 8:14 pm #

    I like it: a break-away faction bent on evil rather than good!

  3. tc responded on 04 Jul 2008 at 10:02 pm #

    For somebody emphasizing the difference between a document format and a document reader, you seem to be having trouble telling the difference between a document reader and a company.

  4. chris responded on 05 Jul 2008 at 9:15 am #

    A software company is only as good as its products.

  5. Eran Galperin responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 1:21 am #

    Adobe makes great software products, however their attitude towards their users is very questionable. I recently downloaded good ole Reader 6.0 (http://www.brothersoft.com/downloads/adobe-reader-6.html) and I’ve no intention of upgrading it in the foreseeable future.