Seriously, Adobe, between updates to your Flash player (which frequently go awry and cause my system to hang) and updates to Acrobat Reader, you’re wasting a noticeable amount of my time. I think I’m going to dump Acrobat Reader and look for viable replacements. I know that they must be out there; Goodreader on the iPad is already a better way to read PDFs than your product.
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On Windows, I know Rebecca is a fan of Foxit Reader. I haven’t used it as much, but it does seem less bloaty than Adobe’s version.
Foxit Reader was what came to my mind first also. However, when I tried it some time ago I found that its rendering was a little dodgy. Maybe it’s better now, but c|net’s review of the current version was somewhat lukewarm. I’m currently trying the awkwardly named PDF-XChange Viewer, available for free from here. I haven’t yet used it enough to decide whether I’ll stick with it, but it does seem to load and display files quite rapidly.
I hadn’t used Reader in years until the other day, haven’t even had it installed. I always just use the built in OS X thing until I was shocked to find something that wouldn’t open with it.
Flash, oh Flash.
I’m currently harboring (and testing) the opinion that Flash is responsible for my main PC crashing with a BSOD as frequently as several times a day. Some googling reveals that I am not alone in this opinion. There’s a somewhat snooty and defensive post on some Adobe support forum in which an Adobe rep asserts that Flash can’t crash the system because it has insufficient privileges to do so, and any crash that seems to be caused by Flash is actually a crash in a video driver or something which is revealed by Flash’s use of the driver. While this may be the case, it’s a distinction that isn’t particularly interesting to the end-user. OTOH running a web browser without Flash is nearly impossible these days, so I’m not exactly sure what the long-term solution will be. (Yes, I’ve updated my video drivers, etc.) I may try doing all of my web browsing under Linux running in a virtual machine.