Comment by old-gregg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by old-gregg | Hacker News Reader

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One isolated incident? Please... Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows? I don't have anything against Adobe, I haven't ever spent a dime on their software, so who am I to complain, however:

Just about the only reason I need to reboot my Mac is whenever I watch flash video (southparkstudios.com) and forget to close it before I shut the lid down. When laptop wakes up, it's frozen and I can't kill the browser.

Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound, but it also crashes regularly and generally looks and feels completely fucked up: wrong font rendering, steals focus and mouse clicks form the browser, etc. Ughh..

Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world.

And finally, their ridiculous Flash implementation burns my lap, I'm not kidding - whenever I visit a heavily flash-infected site, my MBP gets burning hot even for small video inserts on ESPN. BTW it also greatly reduces my battery time. Adobe software is probably the only reason why surfing the web on a 5 year old PC is a very unpleasant experience.

They are one of these old, big fat monopolies the world would be better without, but we have no choice.

Suggesting switching to GIMP isn't an argument. All our designers use Photoshop and nobody needs conversion headaches, Adobe owns the industry, it's called the vendor lock-in.

I've experienced the same performance issues with the Flash plugin on OS X. I use the iStat menus to keep a tab on my CPU usage, RAM usage and system temperature. Browsing the web takes very little CPU, and there are spikes in CPU usage only when I open a new page and the browser tries to render it. Just reading a webpage takes no CPU, as expected. Temperature remains in the range of 35 to 45 degrees Celsius.

Enter Flash. CPU usage oscillates rapidly between 0% and 30%, sometimes even going upto 70%. The temperature rises to 70 degrees Celsius.

This problem is not just Mac-related. I've experienced high CPU usage even on my Linux PC. IMHO, Flash is pure evil.

What amazes me is that Adobe Acrobat gets larger and larger in every new version. And it always wants to access the internet.

I don't know about flash - I disable it by default. Disabling it gets rid of both annoying moving advertisements and crap plugins...

Yep. Add to that, the acrobat installer, silently without notice or any option to avoid it, installs Adobe AIR without your consent.

I take this as a sign of a company entering a stage of decline. Successful companies on the rise do not need to use subterfuge to get deployment of their products. When a company starts to become hostile to its own customers you can tell the rot has set in. These days it is nearly impossible to download simple software without getting crapware along side it (Sun is another prime offender, and even Flash tries to shove toolbars down your throat.).

Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound

I walked a friend through the installation of Ubuntu on his laptop last week. The single sticking point we had was Flash's poor interaction with the sound system. That one issue took longer than the entire rest of the setup process.

>Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows? Is that really serious? OK so Adobe9 doesn't work on Vista, you can't rollback to 8 and Adobe's site won't let you download 8 if you are on Vista. But that's not really serious for the majority of PDF users who are happy to fiddle with the registry to fix things but aren't capable of installing Foxit.

"Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world." I guess you hate apt and yum too? Gee, having a list of programs that are installed is really lame.

Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg.

Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish.

(originally posted by user: wizlb)

Lame? Mounting a DMG is no different from unpacking an archive, but unlike self-extracting executables this operation is 100% safe since no code gets to run. This is much better than "Are you fucking insane to run this?!" scary dialog boxes that Windows throws at you when you click on a downloaded .exe. Do you know how many people actually do get scared and delete your precious app instead?

Second, inside of a .dmg you normally find an application bundle that you simply copy into your Applications folder. What can possibly be simpler than copying a file?

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