It's funny that the graph uses logarithmic scaling which makes the increase look much less dramatic than it really is. On the other hand, a lot of stock charts use linear scaling which makes more dramatic than they really are. I think it should be the other way.
The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
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Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
#82Adobe 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.
100%. I recently took a pdf map from a foreign country, rotated it, and. overlaid English notes using macOS preview. I saved and it opened fine in Preview. But when I tried opening the edited map pdf on iOS in the native pdf viewer it was not rotated so the notes were meaningless. Acrobat Reader for iOS opened it correctly.
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.
Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
For reference, here's a version with a linear y-axis: https://imgur.com/a/A2D1puk
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.
Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right, why would anyone use Adobe Reader instead of the built-in Preview on Mac? Though Preview has its own limitations.
How does Preview suck? The only thing that comes to mind is that it is missing some advanced PDF features that involve JavaScript (which, to some, might be seen as an asset).
About 1 in 15 of the pdfs I view in Preview have some sort of "corrupt jpeg" artifacting on the first page. (These are scans of old books, magazines, typically.) There will be a diagonal staircase of green blocks, each what I assume is the DCT 8x8 size going all the way down the page, along with what looks like a missing color channel. The same pdf if opened with Firefox will look fine (so pdfjs gets it right). This has gone on for years, something to do with MacOS's own rendering of pdfs (so trivially switching to another app is unlikely to fix it). I have no idea what this is, I can't even think of a good description with which to google the problem...
Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
#85The 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.
Faster than what?
Faster than browser based PDF display; I haven’t done head to head testing against muPDF or Zathura however.
Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
#86Adobe 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).
I have a plugin for Illustrator that has several options for helping to make sure your file gets saved regularly. I have it configured to just pop up a polite little warning after fifteen minutes of unsaved work.
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.
Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to have Adobe Reader installed at my last job because there were official federal and state government PDFs we had to work with that only displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.
>Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader. So they intentionally broke the documents for anything not Reader?
There are multiple PDF standards. It is possible to rig up documents that display differently depending on which standards are supported. Acrobat is (or at least used to be) the only thing which truly supports them all.
Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
#88Note: log scale on the y axis. Current Adobe reader is 83x bigger than current Sumatra according to the chart.
I looked at the graph first, and misread the version numbers as sizes in megabytes, because that yielded stuff that wasn’t far off matching the curve linearly. “25.1 MB?” I said. “Huh, I’d have expected a lot more than that, but… maybe it’s just ultra compressed? Somehow? Still seems a bit too small. But maybe this article is actually praising Adobe for keeping it down.”
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.
Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
#89Log scale makes you miss how bad it is.
Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
#90Adobe 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 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.