The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years • Hacker News Board

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#21

Post by microflash » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

kelsey98765431 wrote: post #18

IshKebab wrote: post #14

> for anyone sane would install it via scoop anyway The lack of awareness here is mind-blowing. Good post otherwise. Great graph.

I am not super familiar with the windows ecosystem but my understanding is that scoop is a package manager similar to choco or nuget correct? is scoop seen as bloated? thanks

scoop is fine since it keeps itself confined to user profile, unlike some other package managers.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#22

Post by Havoc » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

Worst part is the browsers are now better anyway at filling in forms and signing etc while adobe crap tries to upsell you for that

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#23

Post by wanderingstan » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

robin_reala wrote: post #2

Note: log scale on the y axis. Current Adobe reader is 83x bigger than current Sumatra according to the chart.

Yes. Log scale seems like a poor choice, given that the point is to show the relative size disparity.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#24

Post by cedilla » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:27 PM UTC

on_the_train wrote: post #16

patcon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesn't it looking straight (ish) on a log axis mean it's an exponential relationship, not linear?

The quantity (file size) is a linear one

What does it mean for a quantity to be linear?

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#25

Post by shrubble » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

The only difference I’ve noticed is the speed of display; but if you’re reading dense technical content that doesn’t matter much. Adobe Reader is faster if needing to view a lot of pages quickly.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#26

Post by user_7832 » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

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 appears to be Xodo PDF with pretty much all features, but it has a ton of popups.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#27

Post by alnwlsn » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:31 PM UTC

ElectronBadger wrote: post #3

Meanwhile... > apt show zathura | grep Size Installed-Size: 1,018 kB Download-Size: 224 kB

My favorite PDF reader currently. It's limited, but faster than anything I've tried.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#28

Post by scrumper » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:33 PM UTC

iJohnDoe wrote: post #15

scrumper wrote: post #7

I was pretty shocked by this. I recently bought an old PC laptop to use in my workshop, to run some engine diagnostic software and machine control stuff that doesn't work on Mac. Of course one of the first things it needed was some PDF reading tool so I went for Reader, figuring Adobe's tool would be the least scummy. Installed it and suddenly I was getting McAfee popups? God knows what else it installed along with i…

All browsers open PDF files really well and sometimes better than Acrobat. Just need Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.

I'm generally looking at multi kilopage manuals where rapid search and navigation are important, and good zooming for diagrams. I didn't even try a browser as the machine is a bit constrained and I just thought it'd be too slow. But I'll try...

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#29

Post by carlosjobim » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

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

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#30

Post by perching_aix » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

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).