March 17, 2009 4:03pm by Steve | 
Let’s face it. Adobe software has continually defined the term “software bloat” in the same way that Intuit software defines the phrase “nickel and dime you to death”.
Take a look at Adobe Reader. This is a piece of software that is supposed to be a tiny sliver that allows anyone to be able to view PDFs without owning the main product. It is merely a document viewer. So why the freak does it occupy 300MB of hard drive space?
To get a handle on that number, think of it terms of good old floppy disks. If the current Adobe Reader came out in 1993, it would have come in a box stuffed with about 200 floppy disks. For a document viewer!
And why the freak does it ask you to download updates EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU RUN IT? Can the devs at Adobe please stop tweaking the damn thing? I don’t know about you, but Adobe Reader has functioned for me in the same exact way ever since I first installed it way back in the late 90s. All those updates and no discernable benefit to me.
I’m done. I’ve uninstalled Adobe Reader, reclaimed the 300 Megs, and installed Foxit Reader… which is everything Adobe Reader should be. It works great and it occupies 7 Megs of space, which is 2.3% of that claimed by the hog.
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I’m glad someone else realizes that adobe makes nothing but bloat.
I’ve been using foxit for some time and love it. Though it sometimes chokes with PDFs with complex vector drawings.
Combined with the open source PDFCreator you can dump adobe and their bloatware all together.
Mike,
It is a pretty broad generalization to say Adobe makes nothing but bloat. I don’t think they are better or worse than any other software maker. Acrobat definitely has some stability issues, though. Especially with the browser plugin.
As with many programs, there are "Fringe" features added over time that a lot of people don’t use. That stuff adds to the bloat for normal use.
The thing that keeps me w/ Acrobat is the ability to digitally sign documents. Does Foxit reader support digital signing? Can it verify a sig? From what I see on the Foxit site, it cannot.
But, that is probably a fringe people that many people don’t use (and I’m not even sure if those are available in the reader or the full version of Acrobat).