Dear Adobe

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

July 2, 2007

Dear Adobe —

Acrobat sucks gigantic mountain-goat testicles. Everything about it from the installer to the interface to its performance seems designed to be as user-hostile as possible. Everyone involved in this project should be ashamed.

That is all.

Comments:

Terry:

The installer is the worst for OS X.

Let's see, let me download a .dmg and run it...and then, oh, let's download some more files. I mean, what did I just download the dmg for, Adobe?

Answer me! ;)

Tom W. Most:

Strange. I was going to rant about how Reader consumes ever-increasing amounts of memory as you scroll through a document, eventually crashing when it has consumed all free memory. However, when I went to take a screen shot of the memory use graph of this process, I found that it doesn't do that anymore. So Adobe seems to have actually fixed the no. 1 worst characteristic of Reader; all that's left is to fix the 99+ remaining.

Let the Reader-bashing resume. (Bonus points to the first person who points out that PDF e-books are useless!)

ars:

Agreed. I've never needed to fire up Adobe since switching to Foxit about a year ago.

Noah Aboussafy:

The biggest problem seems to be that they think everyone needs all of manditory the "enterprise" plugins. Mostly because the enterprisey types that DO need them are too stupid to download something and Adobe is too lazy to make them load on the fly.

Not once have I ever needed to validate a digital signature on a document using a centralized enterprise CA which integrates with our domain controller.

Why can't that load on the fly? Well it certainly can. Open the contents of the Adobe Reader.app and move the plugins you don't want to some other folder. My reader takes 19-30MB of memory and loads in under 1 second now.

I'd like to see Adobe offer a stripped down version for those of us that just read and print little documents. I don't need an eBook manager, or commenting, or work flows. I just need to open things, read and maybe print them... maybe search but that works pretty crappy anyways.

Fredrik:

"Everyone involved in this project should be ashamed."

My name might appear under "legal notices" (at least in Reader 7), but I can assure you that I wasn't involved in their decision to borrow code from the Python Unicode implementation.

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