Adobe Acrobat is a Joke
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.
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.
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.