I’d love to know what on earth got into Adobe’s head when they decided to turn their PDF reader into a stinking pile of sluggish bloatware? Who here remembers the old days when the Adobe Reader download was less than 10MB?

Take a look at the details on their current download page (which I was recently forced to visit because of a security flaw in the Reader’s functionality that has now been patched):

New Adobe Reader 8

• Work smarter - a clean new look, custom toolbars and an RSS reader
• Work faster - 2D acceleration (requires video card support, Win only)
• Work together - new online conferencing with Acrobat Connect

WTF? I want a simple, fast PDF reader…

• Do I want custom toolbars? Actually, no, I don’t. I want a single standard one with a few helpful buttons, and that’s it.
• Do I want an RSS reader? HELL NO! Give me a SMALL download. If I want a local RSS reader, I’ll go grab one. Otherwise I’ll stick to tools like Google Reader.
• Do I want online conferencing from a bloody PDF viewer? No, I most certainly do not.

I don’t see the reasoning behind all this crap. It’s another example of software going off the rails. The authors are just trying to squeeze in too many features. A PDF reader is not a platform for collaboration or communication. It should render a document for me to read. That’s about it. What makes it worse is that they claim it to be fast, but it’s not!

On top of this, you have to have some shitty little Adobe Agent running all the time, which undoubtedly gives this application the “amazing speed” they seem to be talking about.

For another kick in the nuts, they require you to reboot your machine after installation! Oh. My. God. Why?!

Here’s the icing on the cake…

Adobe Reader 8.1.1 - 22.3MB

Holy crap. 22.3MB!! What a joke. That’s an obscenely large download for a document viewer. People wonder why I stick to Foxit Reader?! It’s fast, it has all the functionality I need, and it’s only 2.1MB. That’s what we need more of. Software that’s small, functional and hits a point of pain, nothing more.

So, other than the obvious candidates (Windows, Norton Product Suite, etc) what bloatware have you suffered lately?