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The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

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Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#91

Post by staticman2 »

robin_reala wrote: post #34
behnamoh wrote: post #4

Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. 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.

If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.

Sometimes Mac users need to communicate with Non Mac users and it's helpful to be using the same PDF reader software so you know what you send them is the same as what they'll see.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#92

Post by wonger_ »

diggan wrote: post #36
robin_reala wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.

> joining multiple PDFs together 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.

qpdf is usually my PDF wrangler of choice:

  qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf 2,3 b.pdf 7-23 -- out.pdf

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#93

Post by qualeed »

ginko wrote: post #83
qualeed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the purposes of this article , this graph is much more effective at making the point than the log scale one. I think it would have been a better choice to use a graph like this. Thanks!

But you can barely tell the growth of sumatrapdf in the non-logarithmic chart. Same for Adobe Reader before 2000 or so.

For the purposes of what this post is communicating, I don't think the exact sizes of adobe prior to 2000 or the exact size of sumatrapdf matters at all.

The linear graph instantly communicates:

    - sumatrapdf has barely changed size in the same time that adobe's size has grown exponentially

    - adobe's crazy growth spike started ~6 years ago
Maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't realize the graph had a log y-axis at first. Then, once I realized that, I had to spend a bit of time parsing the graph to figure out what it was saying (I don't work with log graphs often at all). And once that was done, the only thing I came away with was "wow, adobe grew a hell of a lot when sumatra didnt", which is the same thing the linear graph told me instantly.

Being able to see that sumatras size remains relatively flat while adobes size growth is practically vertical is all the granularity I care about at a glance. If I want to know exact sizes, I'll dive in deeper.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#94

Post by hbn »

winkelwagen wrote: post #32

At this point i don’t trust large programs anymore. Someone recommended to use Lens to manage a k8 cluster. That application was a 600mb install file and if I’m not mistaken double that after installing on a Mac. Desktop software has become so crazy. Meanwhile the blender download is 300mb. It is not that I’m looking for over optimized software. But a 2gb k8 console doesn’t spark trust in the developers to begin with…

It's not much better on mobile. I just checked a few apps on my iPhone: Instagram, TikTok, Duolingo are all about 500mb each. And many of these apps are gigabytes when you use them for a bit and it caches things.

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.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#95

Post by carlosjobim »

carlosjobim wrote: post #29
user_7832 wrote: post #26

Tangential, is there any good smooth scrolling PDF viewer (for windows at least), that offers some level of customisation of view? (Like 2 pages side by side, and ideally dark mode and full top to bottom pages with hidden toolbars.) 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 appe…

Get a Mac and use Preview

That's some very angry hacker down votes. What's wrong with using the right tool for the job? In another thread I suggested for another poster to sell their Mac and get a PC.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#96

Post by MortyWaves »

hbn wrote: post #90
tines wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. Bravo. Reminds me of that song that goes something like "When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be me."

I listen to a prank call show where one of his recurring bits is to call people who listed used items for sale to let them know that he's not interested in purchasing their item.

Got a link?

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#97

Post by fooofw »

diggan wrote: post #58
mynameismon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who have an installation of LaTeX: It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

> It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this. Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"? If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)

pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be:

    pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf
I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme).

[1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#98

Post by amluto »

maxloh wrote: post #39
behnamoh wrote: post #4

Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. 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.

Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Reader) is still the industry standard for PDF documents, though. 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.

It never ceases to amaze me that it’s any sort of industry standard any more. It has, by far, the worst implementation of form filling (filling forms on existing PDFs) of any modern PDF viewer I’ve used. Even the paid version is pretty bad.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#99

Post by wat10000 »

qualeed wrote: post #93
ginko wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can barely tell the growth of sumatrapdf in the non-logarithmic chart. Same for Adobe Reader before 2000 or so.

For the purposes of what this post is communicating , I don't think the exact sizes of adobe prior to 2000 or the exact size of sumatrapdf matters at all. The linear graph instantly communicates: - sumatrapdf has barely changed size in the same time that adobe's size has grown exponentially - adobe's crazy growth spike started ~6 years ago Maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't realize the graph had a log y-axis at first.…

I think this is an argument for the log scale. I'd argue that the things you say it communicates are not actually correct.

Adobe's size has been growing exponentially pretty much this whole time. The rate increased slightly in the mid-2010s. SumatraPDF started out that way too, but managed to level out after about a decade.

Relative size is what matters here. That increase from ~2.5MB to ~5MB in the mid-90s was pretty significant for the time. In terms of the impact on users, it's probably at least as important if not more so than going from 300MB to 600MB 25-30 years later.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#100

Post by znpy »

behnamoh wrote: post #4

Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. 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.

Back in the days of windows xp i fell in love with Foxit Reader. It just opened PDF documents, no fuss.
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