Do you ever get the feeling that some big corporations have lost touch with their customers? Sure you do. Todays case - Adobe. They're a big corporation and one that holds their own against the other giants the software world. They've certainly found a profitable niche in the software business.
But what's with the load times of their free Adobe Reader? Can you say sloooooooooow? Its a known issue. People have complained about it for years. Developers have written hacks that will prevent many of the plugins from loading. I know, I've tried many of them.
Jakob Nielsen's usability lab test have constantly shown that users hate pdfs.
In several recent usability studies, users complained woefully whenever they encountered PDF files.
Following are quotes from investors area on corporate websites:
"It's a pain that I have to download each PDF. Pain in the ass… I find it to be annoying. It's slow to load. It's hard to search within it. I find HTML easier to deal with… This is all PDF instead of a chart. My dream site is to come to a site and get a bar chart for the sales within the last ten years."
"I hate Adobe Acrobat. If I bring up PDF, I can't take a section and copy it and move it to Word. There could be stuff like graphics I don't want. I prefer documents in HTML format so that it's editable."
You would think that Adobe would listen to these complaints. Perhaps allow us to configure Adobe Reader for speed loading or something similar. Well they haven't listened and I'm not waiting anymore.
Fast and Lean
Foxit Software makes a variety of PDF tools. Check out their Foxit PDF Reader. It's lightning fast, easy to install and you can replace Adobe Reader in about three minutes. Plus it is free.
Sample times on my desktop.
| Adobe Reader |
13 seconds |
| Adobe Reader - modded to prevent addins |
3 seconds |
| Foxit Reader |
2 seconds |
| Adobe Acrobat |
17 seconds |
I'm installing Foxit PDF Reader on all the machines on our network. I recommend you try it too.