Aral Balkan

I was just viewing a PDF in Adobe Acrobat 6.0 and got a pop-up asking me whether I want to upgrade to 7.0. I had put this off due to the large size of the Acrobat plugin but thought, "Hey, what the heck, OK..." and clicked "Yes". Next screen, I had to choose which apps I wanted to install (umm, I thought I told you I wanted to upgrade Acrobat). So, ignoring the Adobe Atmosphere, Adobe Photoshop Album (???) and "Install the Yahoo! Toolbar" options, I added "Adobe Reader 7.0" to my Selected list and *boom* there was "Install the Yahoo! Toolbar" added to my selected list also.

Me: Oooooh! [Clicks on "Install Yahoo! Toolbar" to remove it from the Selected]

Adobe: Hehe, we know what you're tring to do... [Remove button grays out]

Me: So that's how it's going to be, eh? Ok, let's play hard ball. [Clicks Cancel!]

Adobe: Oh no, we're about to lose him... umm, let's try this: [Displays another pop-up]... Umm, would you rather install 6.1 instead?

Me: Why, so you can sneak in the Yahoo! toolbar without telling me, perhaps? No thanks!

Adobe: Oh well... maybe we should review the crap we bundle with our applications in the future.

The funny thing is, I went back in and actually asked to check for Updates while writing this to make sure my post was accurate and this time, it *did* let me remove the Yahoo! toolbar installation. Bug? Or is trying to be really clever by first trying to get away with not letting you remove the Yahoo! toolbar and then, if you cancel, letting you remove it on subsequent attempts.

Comments

• I'm using Acrobat Reader 5.05 with all plug-ins removed. I'm yet to have any trouble reading PDF docs. Granted, for some reason, if I click on a PDF link, IE freezes etc. but I download PDFs anyway and I think a PDF is meant to be downloaded rather than viewed online.
  
  Best regards,
  Burak

  by Burak KALAYCI on 2005-06-24 14:31:53

• I just read about a lightweight PDF reader called FoxIt. Downloading it now...

  by Aral Balkan on 2005-06-24 14:49:07

• I've found Adobe Reader 7 to be a lot quicker (to run and load) and cleaner than version 6, and I don't think you get any Yahoo nags or anything when downloading it as a standalone installer. It opens pretty much instantaneously without running the resident system process beforehand which AR6 did not. There's always the trick where you can delete infrequently used plug-ins from the plug-ins folder to speed up launch by a lot.
  
  But the best thing is the PDF Download extension for FireFox which displays a prompt when you click a PDF link that shows you the filesize and asks whether you want to a) open in a new tab, b) open standalone, c) open as HTML in a new tab. Very cool.

  by Richard Leggett on 2005-06-24 16:00:34

• hi,
  i've been using Foxit since september 2004, it's the best alternative for those who think adobe's reader is much too slow (30 seconds launch to open a 1Mb file...ridiculous).
  cheers

  by julien on 2005-06-25 10:36:26

• Don't download from the Adobe site or any other web page. Go directly to the Adobe FTP site ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/7x/7.0.9/enu/ and download the 20MB file AdbeRdr709_en_US.exe . That should cut out the crap.

  by Cleotis Soprano on 2007-01-11 22:27:12