Technology Rant
in the early afternoon on Thursday, the 27th of December 2007 by Chad
What isn’t wrong with Adobe Acrobat? Very little I’m afraid. Aside from the PDF format itself which isn’t too bad, does anyone like Adobe Acrobat Reader?
Here’s a few choice items from the appropriately named the art of software murder…
- A splash screen lingers for so long that you get a chance to memorise that huge list of patents that Adobe claims to itself, and even perform some basic arithmetic on the first few numbers, by way of passing the time. Have you spotted that sequence of primes yet?
- There is that groan of realisation that can be regularly heard everywhere on the internet, when an accidental click on a PDF in a search results page means that the user is now confined at Adobe’s pleasure for the next minute or so, until Acrobat chooses to give back control of the web browser.
- Have you ever made the mistake of letting the thing upgrade itself via Internet downloads? I let version 7 have its way, and it rebooted the machine three or four times on the trot. Honestly, one of the more gullible heuristic algorithms in the virus checker thought I had got an infection.
Get Foxit reader… do yourself a favor.
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December 28th, 2007 at 9:44 am
A definite case of software being user-vindictive as opposed to user-friendly. I wonder if Adobe is aware of the hatred of their product, or if they even care. Adobe must be a place where Microsoft engineers go to die because their products are soooo bloated that the only comparison is to MS.
December 28th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
And by default the Mac version always checks for an update when it starts.
If you don’t have an internet connection (like on a laptop) it’ll crash every time.
Without letting you look at the PDF.
You can Google for a fix, but it’s pretty arcane for an average person, and it’s not in any of the preferences sections.
December 28th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
My biggest problem is that it loads seemingly hundreds of modules during startup.
This is a huge failure of engineering.
99.99% of all PDF documents are simple fonts and maybe bitmaps. Modules should be loaded dynamically. If the PDF being loaded requires encryption, signing, forms, and who knows what else, then you load them only when needed.
Its like if when you start your car, every single light came on, radio full blast, A/C and heater, the power seats go through a full range of motion, windows up and down… and oh yeah, you were just backing the car up in the driveway.