ARG!

There should be a circle of hell devoted entirely to former employees of Adobe and their Acrobat development team.

I just lost 20 tabs of open web sites, a firefox instance and 20 minutes of my life when another ‘PDF of death’ from the net decided to commit suicide and take my computer with it.

No, it wasn’t a blue screen of death, just one of those CPU sucking moments when Windows decides that the hole ‘pre-emptive’ part of multi-tasking is a nice theoretical concept, but that in practice it should just give in to the first application to go apeshi*t.

Yes, for the last FOUR versions of acrobat viewer at least I get a PDF download that opens in a browser window and dies.

It can’t be that hard can it?  Why oh why can this not work reliably?

On that note, I just downloaded adobe Acrobat Enterprise/Professional/Whatever….. it took up 495MB of my drive.  it came with its own download manager, it loaded its own ’speed launcher’ app into start up, when I reboot, I’m certain their will be a system tray icon, I also now have pdf icons in my office apps.

By the time I get home I should expect to find a copy of itself raiding my fridge and leaving its wet towels on my bathroom floor.

I mean, it couldn’t get any more frigging intrusive could it?

What is it with software companies?  Is it to keep the vicious cycle going they have to make the user experience more and more involved?  What happened to ‘less is more’?

This is how open source / ASP model will win, because it will provide JUST the functionality people need, not all this other CRAP.

That said, I think Acrobat has some neat features, but you need to send your engineering team into a backroom and tell them to not come out again until they’ve found a lighter way of doing it!