The installer is a big download and the application starts kinda slow – why use Adobe Reader when other free Readers are faster?
Some pan Adobe Reader because it’s not as lightweight as some 3rd party options such as the Preview utility in Mac OS X. They argue that Reader is a dinosaur who’s time has already come and gone.
If there are fast and free alternatives available, why does Does Adobe Reader remain the world’s default PDF viewer? Is it just lethargy, or some sort of mind-control?
Hardly.
Contrarian geeks aside, any serious user of PDFs will need Adobe Reader sooner rather than later. Without a concept of “well-formed and valid” PDF, developers naturally resorted to Adobe Reader as the “standard” for the PDFs their applications create. If Reader could open, display and print their PDF, they were good-to-go.
The result, of course, is that the world is now an anarchy of junk PDFs that conform only to what 3rd party developers observed in their tests with Adobe Reader. Reader itself has become the de facto standard for PDF simply because Adobe works very hard to make sure that Reader will open almost any PDF, no matter how poorly constructed.
There are many other reasons to consider Reader, from the powerful JavaScript API to Reader Extensions, but at the end of the day, that’s not why it still stands alone against the increasingly adept alternatives.
Reader remains the popular conception of PDF because only Reader is engineered to deal with the mob-scene of sloppy PDFs that inhabit the real world.
That’s a claim no other PDF viewer can make.
Originally posted on Duff Johnson’s PDF Perspective blog for acrobatusers.com.
By Duff Johnson