Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader is bloatware

[East Africa]
FOR THE LOVE of god, what on earth is Adobe doing with its free Acrobat Reader? Honestly, I haven’t a fuc*ing clue why naive users download this piece of crap software! Seriously. First of all, it’s a bloody 40 MB download. Excuse me, but I thought the purpose of this program was to allow me to “view” PDF files. WTF!? By the way, the word on the street is that Adobe’s PhotoShop and other Creative Suite apps have gone mondo pork-belly over the past few years.

Goodbye Acrobat Reader, Hello Foxit PDF Reader…
Well, thank goodness we live in a world where software development is an extremely competitive field. Folks, please say hello to an amazing PDF reader that does everything Acrobat does and a lot more. All you need to know is that it’ll open your PDF files without any fuss. You can even annotate your PDF documents and then re-save them.Ya don’t believe me? Well, take a peek at the screen shot below. You’ll see my edited text in blue. Try that in Acrobat Reader. Psst…you can’t do it!

It’s obvious that Foxit Reader is a well-crafted piece of software. My hats off to the company’s developers for keeping things on the “slim side” of things — if ya know what I mean. Heck, version 4.11 is only 6.8 MB and version 3 last year was like 3.6 MB. Acrobat Reader, you are hereby banished from my hard disk – forever!

Oh kool…they even have a version for Desktop Linux, Windows Mobile, Embedded Linux, Symbian, Windows CE & U3. Nice. And if you want to create your own PDF files without having to plunk down a pile of cash for Acrobat 9 Standard at $299, then you should take their $129 Foxit Phantom PDF Suite for a spin. I’m sure it’ll do a waay better job than that Adobe’s $299 app.

About the company behind Foxit Reader…

In 2004, Foxit launched its award winning product – Foxit Reader, a small and fast PDF document viewer with extremely easy-to-use features and Foxit’s best-selling desktop software – Foxit PDF Editor. With over 90 million Foxit Reader downloads worldwide, Foxit software has become a high quality, affordable and popular alternative to other PDF software tool suppliers. {source}

90 million downloads? Wow, I’m bloody impressed. Well folks, don’t say I didn’t warn you about the largess Adobe Acrobat Reader. Repent, and use Foxit Reader instead. :-)

Other bloated applications

iTunes (a 70 MB download in order to play “some” music & video files? WTF!?)
- gimme Media Monkey, SongBird or WinAmp any day of the week!
Microsoft Office 2010 (what, a 700 MB download?)
- gimme the amazingly free Open Office any day of the week…only a 150 Meg download!
HP Print Drivers (40 – 200 MB…like WTF!? I only wanna print a damn document!)
Got a bloatware app you wanna share with me? Leave a comment!