Adobe quiet release of Reader software causes people to scream

ADOBE QUIETLY RELEASED Reader 6 earlier this month but already some users are kicking up a right royal racket about its "features".

known as "Acrobat Reader", it includes a few improvements over 5.1, like playing embedded movies, animation, and sound, and letting you "view, organize, and purchase eBooks". But its the way Reader has bloated that's causing the most fuss.

One user, Rolf Terners wrote to a PDF-related mailing list: "I have installed Adobe Reader 6.0 German on two PCs. On a P3 laptop with 256 MB RAM, running Win XP SP1, the 6.0 reader takes 30 sec to load. And on a Pentium 4 DELL PC, with 768 MB RAM, running Win XP SP1, Adobe Reader 6.0 takes 15 sec to load!.". His conclusion: "Reader 6.0 seems to be a high-end software concerning needed resources".

Others aren't nearly as polite as Rolf. "I've installed Adobe Reader 6.0, and, on my system at least, it takes more than a minute for Reader to load in a web page pop-up window. The status line on the splash box claims it is (ponderously) loading and certifying APIs and the like. In contrast to (the old) Acrobat Reader, this is unusable," said another user.

Apparently Adobe hasn't worked much on optimizing the 6.0 Reader's startup time. If you have the reader loaded and then load a PDF file, the page appears with no noticeable delay.

Just consider the skyrocketing download sizes on every new version.

Adobe Reader 6.0 is a 16 to 15 MB download, depending on the chosen program language
yet Acrobat Reader 5.1 was an 8.3 MB download
Acrobat Reader 5.05 was a 8.6 MB download. Despite this, it started much faster than 5.1
Acrobat Reader 4.05 was "just" a 5.4 MB download

You can find Adobe Reader 6.0 along with most(*) previous Acrobat Reader versions, by ignoring the Javascript-based "front-door" download page that always tries to make you download the most recent and as such the biggest and slowest one, based on your choice of operating system and language on its web form.

The list of all Adobe readers is here.

When it was listed, Acrobat Reader 4.05 (US English edition for Windows) was the fastest-loading PDF reader and one still capable, to this day, of opening most of the PDF files that you can currently find on the web.

I say "most" because suspiciously absent is the 4.05 for Windows, US English release from the "alternate download" html listing. But don't worry, you will still be able to find it, for example by clicking here.

Some might actually "need" all the bells and whistles of the 6.0 release, such as videos embedded in PDF files.

Adobe Developers, take note. Some of us just want a fast PDF viewer for "normal" text & graphics pdf files. Even those users with fast Pentium 4 CPUs are complaining about the 6.0 reader's bloat. Now that I think about it, even your multi-platform, java-based "Acrobat Viewer" kicks the 6.0 Reader's rear end. The good news, as we reported at the time, is that Adobe also quietly version 3.0 of its PalmOS "Adobe Reader". It allows you to view PDFs in full color on any PalmOS v3.5 or higher PDA (that includes the IIIc), and new in this version, you can view PDF ebooks with the full DRM shebang. µ

Thanks to the fact that the Palm's memory is rather limited, Adobe developers haven't been able to "grow the palm reader exponentially" on every release!. It grew "only" from a 6 MB download on v1.1, kept its size more or less on v2.0 and it grew to a 9MB download in version 3.0. You can't blame them for not being consistent across platforms.

You can find the new Adobe Reader 3.0 for PalmOS here. µ