Why is Adobe Reader So Terrible?
Mac OS’s ability quickly display and navigate PDFs shows just how awful a program Adobe Reader is. Adobe Reader is slow to load and reading documents is usually an arduous experience resulting in users who roll their eyes every time they realize they have to open a PDF file. I’ve never been a big fan of information in PDF format as opposed to XHTML, but why is using Adobe Reader such a horrible experience when Adobe controls both the format and the viewer?
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The last 8 words of your post hit the nail on the head: Adobe has no incentive to improve its Reader software because it isn’t feeling any competitive heat to do so. The only “improvements” I’ve noticed with the periodic major version upgrades in the Adobe Reader software are more junk features that generate revenue for Adobe.
Reader 7 ain’t that bad. It even loads fast now.
It load faster now, on Windows systems, because Reader 7 runs a process in the background that allows for ‘quickstart.’ In other words, it’s always running.
Maybe after the first start. Tried that just now; but there were no adobe processes running prior to me loading the pdf in my browser and it was twice as fast in starting up.
Ugh. “Quickstart” == “please slow everything else down”
yo if anyone is still following this thread…. check out this software as an alternative.
its amazing: foxit reader
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
w00t w00t all those days of just staring at my computer screen waiting for the next page to load is OVER!!!!
You’re right! Adobe Reader is terribly slow, particularly when opening files on the web. It lags so much and drags down the performance of my computer. I’ve found an Acrobat alternative called Nitro PDF - http://www.nitropdf.com. Performance is much better, very affordable to Adobe Acrobat and same functionality as Acrobat. I believe you can download a demo from the website to try.