![[upgrade are failed]](http://wearehugh.com/public/2008/07/upgrade-are-failed.jpg)
Adobe® Reader® 9 is out. It’s now almost half as fast as Foxit Reader. It lets you embed Flash in PDF and embed PDF in Flash. Adobe supports both kinds of music, country and western. They’ve also “conveniently” bundled Adobe® AIR™ for no apparent reason and added synergistic integration with their cloud, which claims it doesn’t support my browser and then requires both Javascript and Flash to sign up for an Adobe® ID, the use of which is governed by this draconian service agreement, which is a PDF.
You can’t make this stuff up. And apparently it gets worse if you try to, you know, actually install it.
It occurs to me that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to achieve a harmonic convergence with these mega-platforms. “Adobe® Acrobat® version 9 with Adobe® Flash® version 10 with Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 with Adobe® AIR™ beta 3″ will get truncated to “Adobe 9.” Coming soon on Overheard in New York: “Hey, are you on Adobe 9?” “No, I’m on Microsoft 14.” “Pity. I was hoping we could have sex.” Or something like that. Who knows, with these wacky kids today and their vendor-specific runtimes?
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Heh, Sometimes I put a winRAR installer in an RAR archive for a similar irony. I find it amazing that Adobe can be so presumptions to expect you already have an older version of their software on their-I mean “your” system. Ah well, a monopoly gives companies like them enough rope to hang themselves I suppose.
— Jonathan 
The “Adobe Reader” NSPlugin on OS X, since version 8, has refused to load itself into any browser other than Safari — the only browser that doesn’t need it (Safari has built-in PDFKit-based rendering). Total uselessness.
I do have kind words for the brave souls there that do their Linux development, for the last several years they’ve been making extraordinary progress, you can tell that they care. The flash plugin has been improving in compatibility, speed, and stability (well, stable for a NSPlugin :). The Linux “Adobe Reader” app/nsplugin has improved massively too — the version 8 they released around Christmas is probably their best on any platform, and it’s a fuckton better than Evince.
The rebranding of Acrobat -> Adobe Acrobat -> Adobe Reader is really biting them in the ass branding-wise. Average windows users are now associating 20-second browser pauses, random crashes, and corporate enterprise form-submittal douchery. I’ve heard the utterance “Adobe crashed, please help” dozens of times — they’re dragging the one name they can’t abandon through the mud.
— Fred Blasdel
Tried that Acrobat site. Adobe(R) Buzzword(R)? You’re right, nobody can make this up.
— Anonymous
Putting a non-free-proprietary format (Flash) in a now standard format (PDF), does that still make it standard?
— Hub
The sad thing is, until the popular perception of freeware as being made by some script kiddie living with his mother in between downloading porn on Limewire and failing to get laid, Adobe will continue to get away with this.
— Jake
PDF is neither a “runtime” nor “vendor-specific.”
Apparently the only reason that AIR is dragged along with Adobe Reader 9 is so they can install Acrobat.com and run it on your desktop. Sort of a stealthware thing, since there was no option not to have it. It also disguises itself as what I would have thought to be a link to all-things Acrobat on the web, especially reader support and whatnot, instead of what it is, a beachhead on my machine arriving under cover of a black background.
(I like AIR, and already had it installed to run Spaz, Twhirl, and the Pandora application, but I don’t particularly care for this kind of hook-in.)
— orcmid
one of the worst programs to come out of a normally decent company.
Never let this crap anywhere near one of my machines
Thank Jobs that OS X has EXCELLENT LIGHTENING FAST pdf support built right in, written by people who actually have a clue what they’re not doing instead of thinking of new places for adverts. I remember what ver 6 or so suddenly had a new toolbar… and a banner advert in it
— terry
Roll on GNU PDF.
Where are people getting all these PDF files from that need version 9? I’m still using evince for things and I believe that only supports up to PDF 1.5
— Matt Lee
I switched straight from OS 9 Macs to an AMD box and Debian Lenny a while ago. The only Adobe stuff I have missed so far is their superbe PPD for the LaserWriter 4/600. For everything else the Linux equivs are more than adequate – and one does not have to go through 24 hour downloads per patch or upgrade. Any of you ever experienced the misery of Adobes net-installer?
— Bernhard
The new Acrobat 9 Pro on Mac is pretty bad too.
- Installs a second version of “Adobe Help Viewer” (1.0, instead of 1.1) that it DOESN’T EVEN USE in your Applications folder (a problem that has persisted since the first release of CS3 that version 8 was bundled with)
- Installs a second version of “Adobe Updater” (incompatible with the last, which, again, CS3 requires)
- Installs a buggy, slow, and generally worthless PDF plugin for Safari (which already has built-in support) which is reported as being “corrupted” with every Acrobat update if it’s disabled in Acrobat’s own preferences
- Has a help menu that takes about 10 seconds to load on half the machines I installed it on, and crashes the other half
Every new version of Adobe’s software seems to get worse in just about every imaginable way, from loading time to interface design to stability.
— Eric
The problem with Apple’s PDF renderer is that it’s based on an antiquated version of the PDF spec which does not support many of the genuinely useful things that Adobe has added over the years. Try doing some simple gradient meshes in Illustrator and Preview chokes horribly unless you rasterize everything.
Unfortunately, Adobe spent a lot of money acquiring Flash, and like any high school kid who spends a lot of money on an utterly useless trinket that most of your friends stopped caring about ages ago, they have to rationalize their purchase by shoving Flash in everything regardless of whether or not it makes any sense to do so. First it was the application splash screens that opened network connections to servers unknown (John Nack claims that this was done in response to customer feature requests, though he won’t say which customers), then it was the answer to the question nobody asked that is Adobe AIR, and now it’s PDF itself. I cannot wait until the first time some idiot takes a Flash impregnated document down to their local FedEx Kinko’s and pitches a fit when the zitty clerk tries to tell them that they can’t print a YouTube video of their ugly baby eating cat turds on the lawn.
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Gotta wonder who Adobe thinks they’re competing with. If you look at the areas they actually push, there is very little overlap with the areas their users actually care about. It seems like the whole operation is now devoted to smearing itself into every nook and cranny that Microsoft has made any play for, rather than focusing on being better than Microsoft in any of them. And down they shall fall for it.
— Rog
I remove Acrobat from every computer I find.
OS X has excellent built-in support (QuickLook really kicks ass: opens in < 3s for any PDF),
and on Windows machines I install FoxIt reader (nobody can tell the difference, other than it’s faster).
— kL
> PDF is neither
AIR is both.
— Mark
Adobe killed Freehand, that’s enough for me to blame them, and this strategy will lead to FAILURE.
To Eric: The real WFT is that it installs a help viewer in the first place: The built-in Apple help happily displays html files, just like their help viewer. Makes you wonder if they do QA at all, and if they use their own software.
— Maarten Sneep
For professional level PDFs and printing, Foxit is a buggy POS. Stop being a moron.
— Anonymous
Adobe Reader 9 is so bloated, even the Adobe AIR uninstaller is over 40 MB! Reader itself is more than 80% larger than the previous version on MacOS X (108 MB -> 190 MB).
I guess Adobe realizes at this stage of the game, neither Microsoft nor Apple will include AIR by default with the OS anytime soon, so the only way to get people to install it is to trick them. To arbitrarily lump it in with software a reasonably large group of people will download, and install it without even asking them if it’s OK to do so. It’s the “beg forgiveness instead of ask permission” marketing method.
— dave
Sumatra PDF is worth a look as well as Foxit.
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/
As soon as Safari supported pdf files I dropped Adobe Reader. Never did like it, never will.
— Wade
If you cancel the installer before it even gets close to installing the software, it still shoves a shortcut to Acrobat.com on your desktop and in your Start Menu.
Ouch.
The only way to get tar from GNU is in .tar.gz format…
Thanks for the heads up, Mark. I’ll stick with Preview.
Did someone mention Macromedia Freehand?
haha, that POS program was dead in the water back when I was working at a “IPO Startup” in 1999
AND anyone on here running Windows and complaining about Acrobat 9….. THE PROBLEM IS WINDOWS!
OSX Leopard with CS3 does everything I need it to, And I feed the family with it. My Illustrations are perfect.
Acrobat reader has sucked for years now, it sucked on Windows 98, and it sucks 10 years later.
— Anonymous
Well I liked freehand better than I like illustrator and i would love to get a mac os x version of it…
— Freehand rocks your Illustrator
> Putting a non-free-proprietary format (Flash)
The flash format is fully documented and open. The only thing that makes it less free or more proprietary than PDF or HTML is the lack of decent competing implementations as of now.
— bob
Shalmanese, that’s simply not true. Check http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar, and you’ll find tar in shar format. A shar (as you know), is simply a shell script.
— antishalmanese
My theory is that Acrobat and the whole PDF format was dreamed up by somebody who hated literate people with a teeth-cracking, foaming, panting, red-eyed, psychopathic rage. Perhaps somebody who was beat up by their English teacher as a kid and wanted revenge. Maybe somebody who thought the written word was a Commie plot. That’s the only explanation left.
Anonymous, have you ever pondered on the fact that only teenagers and immature geeks use the term POS?
It is also strange, that though your illustrations are “perfect” you hesitate to include your name. Why not? Free advertisment for your perfect illustrations.
— foljs
Have a look at Acrobat Reader Lite: http://www.majorgeeks.com/Adobe_Reader_Lite_d5915.html.
— Sgt Bargearse
I’m having trouble getting it to load on my MS-DOS PC. I mean,…it’s 90 MHz. How much faster does it have to be?
— Fractal_Mind
Martin:
If you look inside the bundle for the “Adobe Help Viewer” applications, both 1.0 & 1.1, you’ll find a copy of Opera 7 circa 2003, complete with banner ad in the toolbar! Opera must have made a decent pile of money from Adobe’s insistence on cross-platform mediocrity.
“Adobe Help Viewer 2.0″ will probably be an AIR app, using Adobe’s fork of Webkit to render HTML help.
— Fred Blasdel
here’s an idea for the help format – use sodding pdf itself.
— tim
Adobe’s little universe is really annoying to me. I just want to install Photoshop but along with it comes all sorts of crap. Like their own help/documentation system (ignoring OS X’s built-in help system), a bunch of apps I’ll never use (Stockphotos) and not entirely sure what they are for (Device, Bridge) and to top it all off, a crappy update system that ignores your prefs and wants to download updates you said you didn’t want for apps you don’t use. It’s reflected with their silly icon design and their recent GUI games for the next version of their Adobe platform. God, I hope they wise up or someone replaces them.
— Justin
Oh yeah, and all the Adobe applications find their respective “Adobe Help Viewer” applications by hardcoded paths instead of via LaunchServices, so if you move your collection of Help Viewers out of your applications folder, help won’t work anymore in the apps themselves.
— Fred Blasdel
Is it me or is it getting really “Airy” in the computer industry,
Adobe Air
MacBook Air
Microsoft Air???
— Enrique
> Microsoft Air???
Aero was there first.
— hdh
Agreed. Adobe is headed in a bad direction. Which is doubly inexcusable given their capabilities and the fact that they’ve absorbed some of the big pioneers in the graphics biz over the last 15 years – Aldus and Macromedia, most notably.
This makes a pretty good case against monopolies. When Aldus, Macromedia and Adobe were competitors they all created some pretty impressive stuff. Can’t say that about today’s Adobe. Maybe it’s time for a Quark resurgence.
— joel
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim