It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in every possible way, and hides basic editing functionality behind subscriptions.
The trashiest piece of crap software. It's up there with MS Word (which gets progressively more bloated on Mac).
Edit: Added "software" after crap for clarity.
Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)
Been on mind a lot lately actually, and I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice. Not from a user perspective anyways (from a dev perspective, it's an easy way out and a "good" way to attention grab... and then not hold).
Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am.
Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.
Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)
How about pop-up with 2fa request? Better to have pop-up for push notification than to look for auth app by yourself.
Bravo. Reminds me of that song that goes something like "When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be me."
I once found that a PDF file created with OnlyOffice displayed as intended on Chrome, but its embedded font couldn't be recognized or rendered correctly on Acrobat.
I keep Acrobat installed only for verifying the integrity of the PDF files I've created.
Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.
So ya looking at binary size alone is not useful. Acrobat may be bloated but there also seems to be some robust code there covering edge cases other readers mess up.
All alternatives always fail short, especially in business context where people get inventive with PDF capabilities.
I keep the official adobe reader around because it's the only way i can sign some crap for the gov.
It's like a virus, I had to remove update daemons and spam daemons and stuff by hand.
Btw the article says it has "AI" now. Where will it send my tax forms?
What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.
[1]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/in...
[2]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/on...
[3]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/AdminGuid...
[4]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/PrefRef/W...
I just cleared Snapchat's cache a few days ago, I barely use the app, and it's somehow taking up 5GB on my phone.
They promised to fix this.
Nowadays I, unironically, mostly use kubectl. I gave k9s a try but i can't make it stick to me, really...
A purely linear graph would absolutely crush their pdf installer and the first 15 years of adobe into a flat line
Then Sumatra being 3.something MB seemed possible, for a well-compressed installer.
Ugh, some of these sizes are absurd. I still remember Zoom basically doubling in a single release, as they put a second entire web browser inside the package.
Adobe also embedded a JavaScript engine in Acrobat to support interactive PDF features like form validation and automation. Both Flash and JavaScript introduced significant security risks over the years.
While Flash is no longer supported, Acrobat Reader still includes JavaScript functionality, which remains a potential attack surface. In contrast, lightweight PDF readers such as Sumatra do not support JavaScript or Flash, offering a smaller and more secure footprint.
There was postscript right, and postscript has a pretty great rendering engine. however the problem is that postscript is too powerful, as a Turing complete language it is hard to use the script results as a document. So adobe used the same rendering engine, tore out the Turing complete bits, added a bunch of structure and ended up with PDF. And the irony... they then proceeded to put the problematic Turing complete bits back in in the form of (spits in disgust) javascript. Hell, if they absolutely needed a scripting language embedded in their document(debatable) they should have put postscript back in.
Adobe Viewer (? not sure of the name) was the only adobe product that had this ability afaik, and while I managed to get an old exe, it's been discontinued unfortunately.
The closest appears to be Xodo PDF with pretty much all features, but it has a ton of popups.
...I suppose that's why I got a framework (13) lol
The lack of awareness here is mind-blowing.
Good post otherwise. Great graph.
I remember trying a year or so ago and it couldn't. Or badly.
I’m not surprised in the least it’s still bloated and terrible. But I don’t think I would have guessed it was pushing the size of a full CD.
What a joke.
Maybe I will try this Sumatra thing that the article mentions. I'm coming from Mac where I have Preview built in, and I really don't have the bandwidth to research a goddamned PDF reader. Very disappointed in Adobe.
I was shocked when the offered executable for Windows 7 was the 600MB+ release and ended up dumping it for SumatraPDF myself.
8 MB is so much nicer than 600, especially on a laptop with only 1GB of RAM.
On Windows I’ve been using PDF-XChange for a decade or so now, but curious if better alternatives have cropped up.
Not a big deal in a nation with 5G coverage but when I am on holiday somewhere in the boonies I realise how we take it all for granted.
> apt show zathura | grep Size
Installed-Size: 1,018 kB Download-Size: 224 kB
Looks like a chart crime scene
not indicated, and the general idea of dataviz is to communicate clearly. when you have a number, what it represents should be noted, and the units. if I see a number in that context, I assume it's calling out the value displayed.
the x axis is also a bit off, would ideally plot the date of the release and use a proper time axis.
a title is also good to have, maybe a data table.
sorry to be cranky but those who are downvoting , try to be clear, learn some standards, or stay away from publishing charts. you can even ask AI to clean up your code to conform to a standard. Soft skills are important for an engineer. You need to explain the work in clear, persuasive language and dataviz. or you can be, I'm a super-smart engineer, you figure out what I'm trying to say, I don't need to worry about making your eyes bleed. crikey.
https://www.datavizstyleguide.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Data-Visualizations-Scholars-R...
