I stumbled on this tribute to Adobe Reader last night. I had taken the steps of upgrading to the new version on my desktop machine, but because I was out and about when the upgrade became available, I had yet to do so with my laptop. After reading the aforementioned article, I decided not to bother.
It made me think – what exactly does Adobe Reader do? It reads PDFs. It isn’t required to do anything else. I would say that I only ever really need to read PDFs if I’m looking for bus and train times and need to download a copy of the latest timetable. Of course, there is the odd occasion when I wish to read a document on the net, and sometimes I do prefer a PDF if its available so that I can read it offline.
Last night I did a little bit of laptop housekeeping, and there was only one update left to do. I’d read about Foxit, and decided that I’d give it a try. It was downloaded and installed within seconds, with none of the usual unpacking, optimising and all the usual crap that reader does. I tried it out, both with Firefox and Internet Explorer, and it’s lightning fast in comparison.
This morning I uninstalled Adobe Reader from both machines. I will also be recommending Foxit to my father, whose update to Reader 9 actually crashed his laptop completely, resulting in a complete reinstall of Windows (to be fair, I suspect there were other issues too), but I’m sure he would be happy with the gain in performance.
I don’t have unlimited PC resources. Much as I would like to upgrade to the latest multi-core processor and have terabytes of hard-disk space, I simply don’t need that kind of performance. I browse, I blog, I occasionally write letters and emails and I play Civ III. I couldn’t afford a hardware upgrade anyway.
So there we have it – another bit of bloatware consigned to the dustbin.
