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Why does Adobe Reader need so many updates?
- m0nastic 16y agoI am more aggravated by the fact that when Reader installs an update, it re-adds an icon to my desktop. For the life of me, I can't think of a single reason why I would ever want to launch Reader by itself (and not by launching a PDF file).
- windsurfer 16y agoIt's a by-product of the silly installer they use. The reader installer team probably consists of 1 guy.
- akavlie 16y agoYou say that as if it's too little... but really, one guy just on the installer?
- cosminlehene 16y agoInstallers are not that easy. Install, uninstall, update, files shared libs, registry entries, services, on a bunch of operating systems with a bunch of os versions for a bunch of application versions. Lot's of workflows, not to mention just MSI has a entire relational database inside an install package. I think it's more than one guy...
- thwarted 16y agoOne is the optimal number of people to put on the task of fixing a bug of this magnitude.
- jordanroher 16y agoI have exactly one reason to launch Reader by itself: when setting up a computer for another user in my organization, I launch Reader once to accept the license agreement on his/her behalf. Then I delete the icon.
- jodrellblank 16y agoDownload the customisation wizard, build a transform which installs it with the EULA accepted and no desktop icon.
- gvb 16y agoWorse, it seems to require a full computer reboot. Every. Time. This implies it is hooked so deeply into Windows that if Reader sneezes, Windows will get an appendectomy.
- estel 16y agoOut of interest, what Windows version are you running? Adobe hasn't asked me to reboot in quite a long while.
- gvb 16y agoWin 7, but, on reflection, I'm not being fair to Adobe. I just remembered I have Acrobat installed on that computer, not just Reader, and it is undoubtedly Acrobat updates that are causing my reboot pain.
- neutronicus 16y agoThis accurately describes the way my university network behaved.
- GeorgeTirebiter 16y agoNot only that, but I have Foxit as my default pdf reader, and when I update Reader on Win7, it forces itself to become the default reader --- WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. This is just aggressively rude of Adobe.
- Luyt 16y agoBrrrr, Reddit still scares me. And these 'Adobe Flash Updates' when I start a Windows machine don't reassure me either.
- Qz 16y agoEver since 10.1 the Flash updater is ridiculously fast and never asks me to restart my system. Easily the best automatic update experience among the various programs that constantly need to update themselves.
- slackerIII 16y agoI think Chrome is still the winner here. I don't even notice when it upgrades itself.
- Qz 16y agoI'm still a Firefox devotee, so I don't have first-hand experience with Chrome. However, I'm not sure there's a good way for Flash to provide that kind of seamless update experience in the same way. It's not an application in itself, so it can't check for updates with the consistency that a browser can, and when it does run it's always to immediately execute whatever flash content was requested, so there's less leeway for it to start updating itself in the background and potentially impact performance. Currently it pops up a window on startup every once in a while (I skipped it the first time and it didn't bug me again for maybe 2 weeks) and its maybe 2 clicks and 20 seconds of downloading. It's not Chrome-level seamless, but it's pretty damn good and I was surprised by how good it was compared to Acrobat and every other updater I've used in the past.
- drivebyacct2 16y agoFlash isn't an application? Sure, it's primary usage is as a plugin, but you can be sure it's an application too. And even if there aren't EXEs anywhere (there are), why wouldn't they bundle one specifically for auto-updates. The rest of the industry needs to get on board with auto updates. Or Windows and Mac need to work on some sort of package management.
- beaumartinez 16y agoSince Chrome started including a PDF plugin out-of-the-box I've started opening PDFs with it and haven't looked back since.
- antidaily 16y agoYeah, just wish there was an easy way to download once in the viewer.
- Pyrodogg 16y agoHave you tried Ctrl+S or selecting 'Save page as...' from the wrench menu? I'm running the dev build so I don't know whats in beta or stable, but I get a nice little dialog box to save the pdf.
- jmilloy 16y agoWhat? Like Ctrl-S?
- spatulon 16y agoThat re-downloads the file from the server, whereas the Adobe plugin keeps a cache of the file and saves it straight to disk. Most of the time there's no difference, but if the PDF came from a single-use URL provided by your bank to view a statement, then there's no way to save the PDF file from the Chrome viewer.
- beaumartinez 16y agoThat is certainly a big usability oversight (especially with large PDFs), I remember Chrome used to do that with images as well. However, if those PDFs are requested via HTTP, unless the bank gives appropriate caching headers I think Chrome is technically correct in re-requesting them: they might have changed in the meantime. (I assume it does the same with webpages when you save them.) The fact that the bank gives you a URL you can only HTTP GET once does sound like very bad implementation on their behalf. Perhaps it's a cookie issue, or even a bug in Chrome itself?
- HaloZero 16y agoHas reddit been appearing on Hacker News far more frequently recently or is it just a coincidence? I'm sure this is the 2nd or 3rd time I've seen it.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mikeryan 16y agoI've completely switched to Preview on the Mac and Foxit Reader on my PC and haven't looked back.
- alanh 16y agoWith you 100%. Except for when I had to read documentation for the UPS API, which requires Reader (by design). Terrible. This isn’t a PDF, it’s an abomination. http://yfrog.com/4ewijp http://yfrog.com/4ewijp
- Spikefu 16y agoGoogle Chrome has a built in (ok, a plug-in, but I think it's there by default) pdf viewer. Works pretty well for me.
- matsur 16y agoI actually view Chrome's PDF plugin as a complete abomination (at least on the Mac), and go out of my way to nuke it. It's slow, and there is _no_ easy way to open the PDF displayed in a PDF handling app (i.e. Preview) without resorting to copy and pasting the URL into wget.
- ludwigvan 16y agoTry Skim on OS X. It's a very good app http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/ http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/ with annotation ability. Preview is also pretty good though, it has nice gems like cropping pages. http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200711012305556 http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200711012305556
- emehrkay 16y agoI left Acrobat when I left Windows :) I feel like it is one of the first things my mom would download and install after a fresh Windows XP format/install.
- nazgulnarsil 16y agobecause adobe sucks. I hate them.
- tybris 16y agoWhen I read that comment I decided it was time to uninstall Adobe Reader and found it was taking up 145MB of disk space. Many thoughts went through my mind. Maybe there was whole virtual civilization in there and I just wiped it out. Maybe Adobe Reader is skynet and I'm John Connor. Maybe it was time to find a new PDF viewer. My first try was Foxit. I found its short name promising. The installer confused me with talks of Javascript and safe mode, did not look good. First paper I opened crashed the program. *sigh. Sumatra was had the colourful charm of the web in the 90s. I was almost ready to give up the resistance. I took a deep breath and clicked the link of the installer. Before the next breath it was installed and I was opening PDFs that looked just fine. TL;DR remove adobe reader, install Sumatra
- trotsky 16y agoSumatra is a good application choice for safety, but be aware - the printing support is either really bad or non functional depending on the document.
- Hawramani 16y agoI moved to Sumatra PDF many moons ago and have never looked back. It is like the Google Chrome of PDF viewers.
- Silhouette 16y agoI'm honestly interested... Was that intended to be a subtle joke or a serious analogy?
- Hawramani 16y agoI was actually serious. When Chrome came out I left Firefox since Chrome was so much faster on my PC. Same thing with Sumatra. I guess the analogy would work well for those who had a similar experience with Chrome. :)
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- TorKlingberg 16y agoThe last time I installed Foxit, it tried to install spyware on my computer. At least with Adobe Reader all the crap comes from the same company. Evince on Unbuntu has worked great for the past few years for me.
- potatolicious 16y ago> "At least with Adobe Reader all the crap comes from the same company." Actually, last time I updated Adobe Reader it came with a copy of McAfee something or another... That was when I nuked all traces of Reader off my system. Not only is their software crappy, bloated, and slow, but it's also a crapware vector to boot. If I were a dev on the Reader team, I'd be pretty depressed about my life - millions of people cursing your name, eviscerating your product in forums and boards everywhere, everyday... and they're right.
- gsivil 16y agoThe fact that millions of people are using their software and the fact that they have a real problem to solve (to silence the haters) does not sound so depressing to me. On the contrary many developers would be happy to have such a problem
- trotsky 16y agoBecause Adobe has some kind of serious systemic code quality issue and they get beat by exploit writers all the time. It doesn't help that their applications are so popular and widely installed that they present a juicy target. I refuse to have acrobat installed, and I'm super paranoid about where I let flash run. If you have flash and acrobat installed and let the plugins run anytime a site requests them you're begging to be owned (and owned and owned).
- singlow 16y agoMake sure the user account that you run flash and adobe reader under is not privileged. I hosed my account once on a bad pdf, but it didn't get past the one user account.
- trotsky 16y agobe aware that pretty much anything doing a remote code execution follows it up with local privilege escalation exploits - which are rather common and frequently don't get top priority for fixes.
- norova 16y agoThat last statement might be a tad exaggerated.... I've been using Flash and Adobe/Acrobat reader for years and have yet to be "owned" through either channel, and I spend a lot of time browsing the web.
- trotsky 16y agoObviously I can't speak to your situation specifically, but it is very common these days for people to have malware that was installed through an exploit that they've never detected - indeed it can be very difficult to detect a lot of modern malware without in memory analysis and skilled forensics. Signature tools and things like malware bytes are extremely hit and miss. OS X and linux are even worse off (at least with standard configurations) once something has done a remote code execution and gotten a privesc. Poll a few people who do security work and ask them if they have acrobat or flash or the jdk installed at all, or running on pages by default. You'll hear about the same thing. Even 5 years ago was a very different world as far as threats go. I'd strongly suggest using an alternate PDF reader (apple, google, evince, sumatra) and using flashblock.
- stretchwithme 16y agoThis app refreshes too frequently. That one refreshes too infrequently. Then I installed this other one and it refreshed just right. Then 3 Bears came in and crushed my computer.
- rdamico 16y agoThis is one of the main reasons why we launched crocodoc.com, to do the same thing to Adobe Acrobat that Gmail did to Outlook: Take a bloated offline application, bring it online, make it easy to use, and make it accessible to the masses. When you think about some of the most common reasons why people use software like Acrobat and Word (e.g. viewing a document, filling out & saving a PDF form, commenting on a presentation with a group), these are all things that should be easy to do online or on your mobile device. That's the vision we're working towards at Crocodoc: view and collaborate on any document on any device.
- bluekeybox 16y agoThis is why I enjoy using Mac OS X -- it has great PDF support built-in, so no need for Adobe software.
- GiraffeNecktie 16y agoEch. What a horribly inaccurate and confused post. Somehow the writer managed to completely conflate Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat, two related but different products. I'm not one to defend Adobe, but this misinformed raving doesn't shed light on anything.
- billybob 16y agoOn two occasions, my wife received PDF monstrosities via her school. The first time, I was astounded at the size of a PDF we had to download. When we opened it, it contained a movie. I was dumbstruck. The second time, I tried to open one with Foxit and was informed that I MUST use Acrobat, which I dutifully installed. This PDF was actually a browsable archive of OTHER PDFs. We already have video files, and even streaming video. We already have zip files. I want to beg Adobe to stop the madness, but if they've already put an email server inside Reader, there is truly no hope.
- westbywest 16y agoThe bar was set at embedding a flight simulator as an easter egg, so Adobe does still have room to grow here.
- tptacek 16y agoThe full PDF standard, for which Reader is the reference implementation and things like Foxit serve but subsets, is also much larger than you think it is.
- yason 16y agoIt's amazing that Windows hasn't got even a tiny back-to-basics PDF viewer included by itself. (Or maybe the more recent versions do?) I've been using evince (or whatever it is that ships with Ubuntu this year) for years and never even considered that there might be a case where one would want to install a separate PDF viewer. Before that, xpdf was the standard reader and it was enough, too. Maybe Linux desktop isn't that bad all together.
- simonbrown 16y agoWindows 7 has an XPS Viewer (Microsoft's attempt to replace PDF).
- Pinckney 16y agoI was seriously annoyed recently when my former employer's payroll software required that I have Adobe's PDF plugin installed to download my W2. It wasn't a .pdf link, no; it insisted on using the plugin before it would let me save a copy.