The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
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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.
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).
Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)
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.
Personally, I wouldn't call this a popup because this was a result of a user action.
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.
How about pop-up with 2fa request? Better to have pop-up for push notification than to look for auth app by yourself.
What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.
Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"?
If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)
pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf
The only downside to this, that I am aware of, is that a new PDF is created (rendered into a new PDF context). That can be lossy in some cases (if there are features that Preview does not support that get "dropped on the floor") and it is possible for the resulting PDF to be larger than the original(s).
qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf 2,3 b.pdf 7-23 -- out.pdfSecond, we use Adobe's comments to markup released drawings or other documents for changes. Then both I and QA put our signatures on the PDF and it's either sent to the factory floor for immediate implementation or sent to the document owner for them to incorporate into a new release. Other readers don't always use comments the same way or don't respect the read only attribute that comments and signatures should have.
I keep the official adobe reader around because it's the only way i can sign some crap for the gov.
It's like a virus, I had to remove update daemons and spam daemons and stuff by hand.
Btw the article says it has "AI" now. Where will it send my tax forms?
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.
So they intentionally broke the documents for anything not Reader?
Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.
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.
Bravo. Reminds me of that song that goes something like "When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be me."
Here's a similar idea where he pretends to be calling from AT&T to let them know they have no incoming calls:
-- the techmoan yt channel
All alternatives always fail short, especially in business context where people get inventive with PDF capabilities.
[1]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/in...
[2]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/on...
[3]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/AdminGuid...
[4]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/PrefRef/W...
I just cleared Snapchat's cache a few days ago, I barely use the app, and it's somehow taking up 5GB on my phone.
Nowadays I, unironically, mostly use kubectl. I gave k9s a try but i can't make it stick to me, really...
They promised to fix this.
A purely linear graph would absolutely crush their pdf installer and the first 15 years of adobe into a flat line
Thanks!
The linear graph instantly communicates:
- sumatrapdf has barely changed size in the same time that adobe's size has grown exponentially
- adobe's crazy growth spike started ~6 years ago
Being able to see that sumatras size remains relatively flat while adobes size growth is practically vertical is all the granularity I care about at a glance. If I want to know exact sizes, I'll dive in deeper.
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 pretty significant for the time. In terms of the impact on users, it's probably at least as important if not more so than going from 300MB to 600MB 25-30 years later.
This is where our disconnect is. Relative change in size means nothing to me. I care about the absolute size of the final thing I'm installing.
Adobe big, getting bigger. Sumatra small, staying small.
In the 90s that jump cost me in terms of modem time. I couldn’t download anything else for an extra 30-60 minutes that day (if I remember my speeds correctly). Today, extra 300mb costs me less than a minute and I can easily continue multitasking in the process.
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?
Way more representative.
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.
Adobe also embedded a JavaScript engine in Acrobat to support interactive PDF features like form validation and automation. Both Flash and JavaScript introduced significant security risks over the years.
While Flash is no longer supported, Acrobat Reader still includes JavaScript functionality, which remains a potential attack surface. In contrast, lightweight PDF readers such as Sumatra do not support JavaScript or Flash, offering a smaller and more secure footprint.
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.
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.
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.
...I suppose that's why I got a framework (13) lol
It is a fairly mature program, it's just that the developer decided to maximize on "small" and "fast" at the expense of other things.
The lack of awareness here is mind-blowing.
Good post otherwise. Great graph.
scoop works always as user.
I remember trying a year or so ago and it couldn't. Or badly.
I’m not surprised in the least it’s still bloated and terrible. But I don’t think I would have guessed it was pushing the size of a full CD.
What a joke.
Maybe I will try this Sumatra thing that the article mentions. I'm coming from Mac where I have Preview built in, and I really don't have the bandwidth to research a goddamned PDF reader. Very disappointed in Adobe.
The upside is that it is extremely fast, there is no loading time because all the images are loaded already.
The downside is that it uses an obscene amount of memory. A 500 page manual could run you 8-10Gb of RAM. Also there is no more text highlighting or control-F.
But the fact that even this "works" as well as it does indicates how much worse PDF readers are at this, especially when you get those scanned documents that still have the full images anyways, with lousy or no OCR. They take forever (multiple seconds per page) to load when your in a PDF in chrome and jump somewhere else in the document. Why not go back to image files for those ones to begin with?
I was shocked when the offered executable for Windows 7 was the 600MB+ release and ended up dumping it for SumatraPDF myself.
8 MB is so much nicer than 600, especially on a laptop with only 1GB of RAM.
On Windows I’ve been using PDF-XChange for a decade or so now, but curious if better alternatives have cropped up.
Not a big deal in a nation with 5G coverage but when I am on holiday somewhere in the boonies I realise how we take it all for granted.
> apt show zathura | grep Size
Installed-Size: 1,018 kB Download-Size: 224 kB
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.
edit: I'm late...
Looks like a chart crime scene
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 cranky but those who are downvoting , try to be clear, learn some standards, or stay away from publishing charts. you can even ask AI to clean up your code to conform to a standard. Soft skills are important for an engineer. You need to explain the work in clear, persuasive language and dataviz. or you can be, I'm a super-smart engineer, you figure out what I'm trying to say, I don't need to worry about making your eyes bleed. crikey.
https://www.datavizstyleguide.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Data-Visualizations-Scholars-R...
Personally, I'm a bit nitpicky about capitalization and punctuation. I guess everybody's got their hobby-horse to ride.