Adobe Reader is a wonderful program. It’s main function seems...

Reminds me of the course I took at Berkeley where the homework was issued as PDF files. Not just any PDF, though; these were designed to be submitted back after you had filled out the form blanks in the file. They used the latest and greatest Adobe extensions to the standard to submit the data over HTTP directly from Adobe Reader, which of course meant that those of us with Macs couldn't use Preview and people on Linux were just plain screwed.

I made as much noise as I could about an electrical engineering course at Berkeley all but requiring Windows, but it pretty much fell on deaf ears.

I don't think I ever managed to clean all traces of Adobe crud off of that poor Mac.

What bothers me the most about Adobe's free player/viewer applications is that installing one of them automagically gets you a copy of AIR and a bunch of auto-update crap. They go against pretty much everything Apple's user experience guidelines recommend, as if they're going out of their way to make us feel like we're back on Windows 98. Gah.

Switched to FoxIt Reader years ago and haven't looked back. There the even leaner SumatraPDF for the performance nerds.