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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

#121

Post by shmeeed »

RockyMcNuts wrote: post #61
ginko wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The labels on the points are version numbers.

ok, that makes sense. 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 cran…

>Soft skills are important for an engineer.

Personally, I'm a bit nitpicky about capitalization and punctuation. I guess everybody's got their hobby-horse to ride.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#122

Post by Liftyee »

carlosjobim wrote: post #95
carlosjobim wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> is there any good smooth scrolling PDF viewer (for windows at least)

Seems like the asker is looking for Windows software in this case. Either way, "Get a Mac (...)" sounds a little unreasonable as a solution for "need a better PDF viewer".

Just my $0.02: I'd presume that if a Mac was a better fit for this commenter then they would have switched over already. For some, the extra attention to detail and improved UX of an Apple device is not worth the extra $$$ compared to an equal spec'd PC. There are also other concerns you are probably aware of.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#123

Post by mcosta »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #107
aaviator42 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of awareness is that the vast majority of users are not aware of and don't use scoop (or probably any package manager) on Windows, especially to install GUI apps, and that doesn't automatically make them "not sane".

Even if someone uses a package manager, they probably use choco. I'd never even heard of scoop before reading this article.

choco needs admin rights, something corporate minions, as me, does not always have.

scoop works always as user.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#124

Post by 93po »

cedilla wrote: post #24
on_the_train wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quantity (file size) is a linear one

What does it mean for a quantity to be linear?

after some searching: it seems like you can have a linear quantity in physics or in dimensions when it involves length. for example, the more fence you have, the more length it has. it's a linear quantity because it scales 1:1

outside of that you can have a linear relationship, which is more like: income per hour worked. the more hours you work, the more income you have. and ignoring overtime pay, it's a 1:1 ratio again

i dont believe the graph involves a linear relationship, because the the filesize doesnt increase the same every year. there's no connection between time progressing meaning filesize is inherently bigger. and file size isn't linear quantity because it doesnt involve a length.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#126

Post by wtallis »

perching_aix wrote: post #30
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.

> annoying pop ups 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).

Consider how some developers today talk about "toast" notifications: they understand on some level that calling them pop-ups is bad, but came to a consensus that using a different name was appropriate, rather than not actually making pop-ups in the first place.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#127

Post by somat »

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.

"People like to tell you why they're not buying things that they never intended to buy in the first place"

-- the techmoan yt channel

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#128

Post by somat »

breadwinner wrote: post #118

After acquiring Macromedia in 2005, Adobe integrated Flash into several of its products, including Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. This allowed embedded Flash (SWF) content in PDFs, which contributed to increased installer size and complexity. Flash support was eventually removed in the early 2020s after Adobe officially ended support for Flash Player. Adobe also embedded a JavaScript engine in Acrobat to support interac…

I always found the embedded javascript weird in an ironic sort of way.

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.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#129

Post by netsharc »

wtallis wrote: post #126
perching_aix wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> annoying pop ups 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).

Consider how some developers today talk about "toast" notifications: they understand on some level that calling them pop-ups is bad, but came to a consensus that using a different name was appropriate, rather than not actually making pop-ups in the first place.

Theme Hospital (a funny 90's game) had a cool way to do notifications, watch on the bottom left as icons pop up: https://youtu.be/26O35BOTVSI?t=693

Some disappear if left unclicked, I guess if the problem is no longer relevant (e.g. a patient bored of waiting leaves), and they can be attended to in any order.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#130

Post by wat10000 »

conductr wrote: post #119
wat10000 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prett…

I disagree, am with qualeed on this one. I don’t think the size doubling means much at all except raising the question of why did it double? What was added that I care about? My instinct tells me nothing so it’s shouldn’t really be acceptable except this is par for the course these days. Nobody cares about bandwidth it’s just assumed to be fast and unlimited by nearly every publisher of software. In the 90s that jump…

Imagine there had been a 50MB jump in 1998. That would be a major WTF moment. Now imagine a 50MB jump in 2025. We'd barely notice.

Saying Adobe's crazy growth spike started six years ago is just pointing to the knee in the exponential curve. It's had pretty much the same curve since version 1.0. And SumatraPDF had the same exponential growth for quite a while.

If absolute numbers are what matters and an extra 300MB is not important, then why not scale the Y axis to 1TB and squash everything to the bottom?

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