Acrobat reader on the Mac

Am I the only one who really dislikes Adobe (what happened to Acrobat?) Reader on the Mac?

First, it installs a plugin for Safari for showing PDFs inside the browser, which makes Safari really slow. You know the feeling where you clicked on a link not realizing it was to a PDF, and you curse yourself all the way through the unbearably long time that your computer is frozen while the Adobe plugin is loading? So you manually go delete the plugin afterwards.

Having deleted that, you launch it stand-alone, and it’s slooooow to start up. And to add insult to injury, one of the reasons it’s so slow to start is they go check if you’ve been naughty and deleted the plugin, and helpfully offers to “repair” your installation. No thanks!

And then a bit later, once you’ve closed it and sighed a sigh of relief that it’ll be another few months till you see its face, an application icon starts dancing saying you should upgrade to the latest point release. I go “sure, if that keeps you happy” and click install. But wait, I have to quit Safari first, so they can install the evil plugin again. That’s when I hit cancel. Arghh!

I’m sick of it, they so don’t get the Mac. Which is odd, given how Adobe really got started on the Mac. Hm, times change, probably a different team responsible for it today.

It all reminds me of Windows. Remember the file type turf wars? Where different programs are fighting for the same file types, so every time you launch an app, it checks and asks you if it should reclaim the ones its lost since the last time. Poor users—imagine your fridge and your freezer fighting over the pasta sauce. Enough already, just leave it where I put it!

But what to do about the Reader? Just say no to Adobe Reader!