Adobe Reader 9 is here – Why make us suffer?

So Adobe Reader 9 is here, and someone somewhere claimed, for whatever reason, that it is actually faster to start.

Being brave (read: foolish) soul that I am, I went directly to Adobe site to quickly download this latest marvel of modern technology. To summarize the next few paragraphs, or if somehow (strangely) you don’t enjoy reading about other people’s suffering, all you need to know is that half an hour later it is still Not Installed, and what’s more, it has successfully removed all previous versions of Adobe Readers from my PC.

The saga started with Adobe.com forcing me to install ActiveX control (their "download manager" ) to download this humongous "reader". Of course you need to be careful to uncheck the "free" Google Toolbar that they are offering along with the reader. Whatever happened to the days when this was considered Spyware trickery? What, Google Toolbar of course "phones home" everything you surf, among other of it’s "features". And why would I compromise the security of my browser with some sort of "Download Manager"? Why not provide me with good old simplicity of downloading the installer directly?!

!! WARNING *RANT* WARNING *VERY LONG RANT* WARNING !!

So I fall for their silly trap and install the "Download Manager" (by someone called getRight?) and it downloads, and before it completes I of course decide to close the original window where the thing started, like you usually would do after clicking "Download" from a page, you really are done with it.

And 10-15 minutes later I realize that something is wrong, the Download window is no longer minimized, but simply disappeared. Later I learned that it closes as soon as you close the browser tab where it started, brilliant technology.

So I restart, download resumes and finishes. Wonder, I think! Behold the amazing new Reader. Not so fast, in fact very slow is the word that comes to mind. On Quad Core Suppa-Duppa computer (yes, official term) it takes almost a Minute to decompress the package! Who wrote this genious compression algorithm?!

But it gets better! The installer launches and says that I need to close my Firefox (ok… ) and my IE, to complete installation. But wait, isn’t the "getRight" installer started from IE!? Brilliant! So I close the IE, and since installer runs separately it doesn’t close, but it doesn’t work either! It informs me that some sort of IE is still running and it can’t continue and HAS to abort. So I scout System processes, and do find IEUser.exe running somehow, I kill it and do what?! Click on the getRight installer, of course, since that is the only thing I got. And it launches IE again! And again tells me to close IE, so I do, but this time it is clearly feeling better! Instead of failing, it proceeds to happily Remove all old version of Reader.

Great, I think to myself, finally after all the hard work, I’ll get to experience the snappy new Adobe Reader (as if..). No such luck at all, instead it happily tells me that there is no source at all, nothing to install. Thanks for coming, don’t call us, we call you! Yes, of course I tried going back to original site and "re-downloading" the whole thing, only to be happily greeted with the same message (after patiently waiting for some mysterious "data" to decompress, of course).

!! WARNING *RANT END* WARNING !!

All I want to add at here is this: Yesterday I burned and booted something called Fedora 9 64Bit edition, which is Red Hat’s Open Source Linux distribution. Guess what, while researching something online via their fine Firefox 3 browser (preinstalled), I stumbled upon PDF document online. Instantly (even though it ran off a simple CD) it loaded PDF reader and presented me with clean easy way to read the document. That’s really all I wanted.

Adobe, why kill your own successful monopoly by bloating it up and unleashing untested software onto unsuspecting public? Oh wait, perhaps they are following in Microsoft’s footsteps! What? I love Vista!!! 🙂

Happy upcoming 4th, everyone! Let Freedom Ring! Yes, I will celebrate by installing Fedora 9.

UPDATE: After re-downloading, re-booting, re-trying, etc, it installed somehow. No, it isn’t much faster to start, and Look! There is now handy “Purchase Adobe Acrobat” option, how nice of them! …. NOT!

Comments #

Comment by Boris on 2008-07-02 15:20:13 -0500 #

I love Linux Live CDs/DVDs since my first experience with on of them (something like 4 years ago).
Did I get it right?
You are going to install Linux?

Comment by Adi R on 2008-07-03 00:48:44 -0500 #

I am very close to installing Fedora 9, yes. I even changed my main partition today, shrinking it to make room for Linux partition.
However, I need solid reason for installing it. Day to day Windows Vista is running fine overall, and does everything I throw at it, pretty much.

Comment by Benjamin Huot on 2008-08-27 17:11:13 -0500 #

There are several other free PDF viewers for Windows which are more efficient, but if you are able to switch to Linux, I think that is even better.

Fox-it Reader is free for non-commercial use and can handle almost everything Adobe Reader can but much much smaller and faster.

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

Sumatra PDF viewer is open source

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/

Comment by Benjamin Huot on 2008-08-27 17:18:58 -0500 #

Also, Adobe Reader 9 seems to work well on my Mac, but I rarely use it as Preview – a PDF viewer that comes with Mac OS X is much faster and makes the text and graphics look better. On Linux, I use Adobe Reader for some of my work flow, but I have stayed with the version 7 as version 8 hangs because it think I have too many fonts. Something maybe to with having LaTeX installed on Ubuntu.

Comment by Adi R on 2008-08-27 17:39:30 -0500 #

Ubuntu, which I now have as a dual boot on my main Vista PC, also comes with a very nice and very FAST PDF viewer. Yea, I don’t understand why Adobe trying to kill their own viewer by making it hard to install and slow to use…