Aral Balkan

Rick Strahl posts I hate Adobe Acrobat (even more now!) and it appears, from the comments, that a lot of people agree with him. Adobe really has to do something about the Acrobat Reader. Personally, I don't have to worry about it as Preview displays PDFs on OS X without the need for additional software. When I was on Windows, however, I used Foxit Reader as it is much faster than Acrobat and doesn't contain any of the bloat.

Comments

• wow there are some haters on that thread... I won't get worked up about it but they have a point. What annoys me the most about Acrobat is that it appears to display a new document at seemingly random zoom - I always reset it to 100% yet the next PDF I open is once again something stupid like 164%... What's th elogic behind that? And if the new Acrobat is faster then please not at the expense of adding it to my autostart folder... why does every program want to be there? Quicktime, iTunes, Acrobat, Nero, Realplayer - heck I don't want any of you eating my system resources. Leave me alone until I click you!

  by Stefan Richter on 2006-10-09 13:51:10

• Hi Aral -- Rick's Feb05 article is the top Google hit on search term "hate adobe acrobat" -- it's still impressive on how the article attracted 145 comments over the past 20 months, though. I know that the Acrobat team, its business unit, and the whole company is aware of these types of posts. I'm not sure yet how well Reader 8 will address them. Part of the root issue I'm seeing is that lots of people just want to predictably print HTML documents, which the browsers still don't provide... these folks see PDF technology as "HTML Print", rather than as the collaborative workgroup client where Acrobat has its most important uses. They have different experiences of PDF itself. Could I turn the question around? What would you like to see documents become? Aside from the current browser extension, could you talk about outstanding needs you see in your own daily use of forms, archived document packages, collaborative documents, and things like that? How would you like the future to turn out...? tx, jd

  by John Dowdell on 2006-10-09 14:37:13

• Nice comments John and an interesting point about "HTML Print" being the main perception of PDF. Maybe Adobe could do a little more to promote the much beligned Flash Paper, now that we have Apollo firmly on the horizon we even have the possiblity of a Flash Paper Reader... My folks are in the print industry so I know all the amazing things that PDF can actually do, but I'd say that the vast majority of decision makers in the web industry don't. Jolyon

  by Jolyon on 2006-10-09 17:01:58

• I've voiced my opinions on Acrobat quite a bit in the past. It is a bit of an oddity from a company that has consistently released quality software. Is it because it's free? Does it not qualify for the standard QA practices? Do they need to show revenue to investors from it and hence feel pressure strap on ridiculous advertising and bundles? PDF is indeed an absolutely wonderful format coming from one of the most capable software companies on the planet, what's going wrong here? I just hope that this doesn't migrate to the Flash player/plug-in in future releases.

  by Alex Schleife on 2006-10-10 07:11:17

• I understand that Adobe *wants* to offer much more than document display with Acrobat but... I still never filled an Acrobat form and I'll probably never will need to Connect with a distant client to discuss some comments he made in real time on my shared document and stuff. That sounds awesome but I don't care about these features when I just want to read a white paper or print a simple document! And I second Stefan comment about infesting the system startup.

  by Philippe on 2006-10-10 09:26:22

• great article. I will bookmark this

  by Adobe Air training on 2009-09-30 20:39:08