Adobe has adopted a quarterly update schedule for Acrobat. The second Tuesday of the last month of Adobe's quarters will be update Tuesdays, and Adobe hit this one right on schedule. Acrobat 8,9 and X all got updates today.
System administrators appreciate schedules. They also appreciate software that updates on a schedule. Adobe is offering these quarterly updates via the desktop update mechanism as well as through a SCUP catalog for system administrators. This allows sysadmins to better manage the deployment of updates to Acrobat.
You can read more about today's updates here.
Would you know WHY the filesize of Acrobat Reader 10.0.0 (35M) grew so much? Ver 10.0.1 is now 47M.
Did the embed some junk?
I hope not as it is already bloated.
Clients are starting to ask for alternatives and there are many slimmer free readers out there.
Richard
Richard;
One thing to keep in mind is whether your clients want to be able to interact with any PDF. Most of the free and low cost readers can read PDFs based on some very old specifications. This is typically the one that was aligned with Acrobat 4, and sometimes Acrobat 5. We've come a long way since then, and there is exactly ONE reader that can display all flavors of PDF: Adobe Reader.
If you want your clients to have to maintain different readers for different parts of the day to day business workflow, then have at it. I have many of my former consulting customers who would maintain Adobe Reader or Acrobat along side Preview on a Mac. They liked the perceived speed of Safari, but would always turn back to Adobe Reader when the time came to use a form, watch a video, participate in a review workflow, examine GIS metadata in the PDF, or open a PDF Portfolio to name a few activities.
Another concern is security, and Adobe Reader X is the only PDF reader that is sandboxed. For many enterprise customers, this is critical, and substitutes won't cut it.
Calling Adobe Reader Bloated is like calling a Porche bloated because there are so many hoses and cables under the hood. You may not need all that horsepower all the time, but you sure do want it when you no need it.
Please don't misinterpret my remarks. I always install Acrobat Reader on all the systems I work with (new or ones that I wipe and reinstall). I agree that it is the only one that works with all PDFs.
I didn't know about the sandbox, thanks!
I would like to be able to download the latest EXE though. Currently, one must download 10.0.1 and then run the updater to get to 10.0.3. I don't like having many programs constantly checking for updates (JAVA, Flash, Apple, FireFox, etc.). I use CCleaner to disable all these and cut down the number of tasks that are running.
When I take any laptop out of the box, it usually has 95+ tasks running. Worse, they have older versions of Java and Acrobat. Rather than uninstall, reboot, reinstall, I find it easier and faster to wipe and reinstall. That way I cut the processes in Windows 7 to 32-40 (depends on hardware options like fingerprint scanners and webcams)
Porche...
Yes, I would call them bloated :) They are also bad for the environment (noise, pollution, etc) and your wallet.
At least you are not as bad as Larry Ellison wanting to fly a MiG :)