SillyDog701

by **Antony** » Tue 21 Dec, 2004 11:16 pm

Adobe Reader 7 is out now. (Thanks to Hendikins)
Adobe Reader is formally known as Acrobat Reader, the official tool to read the popular electronic file PDF.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12

by **Antony** » Tue 21 Dec, 2004 11:41 pm

Adobe Reader 7 seems to be faster than Adobe Reader 6. I tested by opening the 736KB of the New York Times Firefox ads, which hung my usual PDF reader - Preview. (testing environment: Mac OS X 10.3.7 on a PowerBook 12" 1.33GHz with 1.25GB of RAM)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12

by **Andrew T.** » Tue 21 Dec, 2004 11:56 pm

A criticism of Adobe Reader 6 in some cases was that its performance was too slow. I haven't had the opportunity to test Adobe Reader 7 yet, but I would not expect a performance improvement on all systems.

In any case, the software's system requirements are now more stringent, particularly for the Windows version:

Surprisingly, Reader 7 is only listed as being compatible with Windows 2000 SP2 or XP; Adobe seems to have cut off support for Windows 98, ME, and NT 4.0. (Windows 95 support had been removed earlier between Acrobat Reader versions 5.0 and 5.1.)

I also find this part interesting:

Adobe's System Requirements for Windows wrote:# Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher

Adobe Reader 6 had listed Internet Explorer in its system requirements as well. Why should this software require a web browser (particularly that one) installed to function properly?

On the Mac side, Adobe Reader is compatible only with Mac OS X 10.2.8 and later versions. Right now the system requirements page states that "Up to 35MB of RAM" is required for Mac systems, which does not make any sense and is probably a typo.

I doubt that I'll be trying Adobe Reader 7 in the forseeable future. For opening PDF files, I'm happy using Acrobat Reader 4.0 (!) on Windows 95 and the included Preview utility on Mac OS X 10.3.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

by **Hendikins** » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 1:13 am

Andrew T. wrote:I also find this part interesting:
Adobe's System Requirements for Windows wrote:# Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher

Adobe Reader 6 had listed Internet Explorer in its system requirements as well. Why should this software require a web browser (particularly that one) installed to function properly?

Two words. Shared libraries.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041222

by Al » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 1:14 am

And I'm pretty happy with Adobe Reader 6.02. It is still pretty fast to load, only about 30 sec. it used to take about 1 and a half minuet on 64 MB of RAM

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0

by **Hendikins** » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 1:17 am

You may wish to update to 6.0.3 if you're still using 6.0.x, as it does have security fixes.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041222

by **Andrew T.** » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 1:29 am

Al wrote:And I'm pretty happy with Adobe Reader 6.02. It is still pretty fast to load, only about 30 sec. it used to take about 1 and a half minuet on 64 MB of RAM

30 seconds to a minute and a half? That sounds phenomenally slow.

By contrast, Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 never takes more than half a second to load on my own system, a 600MHz Pentium III-based computer with 128MB of RAM. Granted, I am using an earlier software version and have more memory, but a 6000% difference in performance still seems amazing.

I'm not sure how fast Adobe Reader 7 would typically run on a computer of these specifications, but I would expect it to be somewhat slower.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

by **Hendikins** » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 1:43 am

I have it running on a PIII650 with 384MB RAM. Shall I get the stopwatch out?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041222

by **Antony** » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 2:00 am

Al wrote:And I'm pretty happy with Adobe Reader 6.02. It is still pretty fast to load, only about 30 sec. it used to take about 1 and a half minuet on 64 MB of RAM

To me, I prefer Acrobat Reader 5 to Adobe Reader 6.02. Acrobat Reader 5 works great for me. (in Windows platform)

In Mac OS X, as I mentioned earlier, Preview is the answer. Except for a few special PDF files.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125

by **Mandrake** » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 3:29 am

Al wrote:And I'm pretty happy with Adobe Reader 6.02. It is still pretty fast to load, only about 30 sec. it used to take about 1 and a half minuet on 64 MB of RAM

That is real slow. Adobe Reader 7 loads within a few seconds on this box.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

by **Don_HH2K** » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 1:22 pm

If you really want my opinion, Acrobat Reader 5.1 was the last truly great version of Adobe's PDF processor. I do use 6.0.2 at home, although I do notice that 5.1 here at work loads much faster. But, if you want a sloth program, there's always Photoshop Elements 2. It takes almost a full two minutes to load! I bet that's what I get for running it with less than 256MB of RAM, with Netscape open...

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)

by **beanboy89** » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 3:47 pm

I just noticed I am still using Acrobat Reader 4.0. I suppose I will not be upgrading to 7. Just by looking at the system requirements, it requires 128MB of RAM, and dosen't appear to support anything older than Windows 2000. Oh, well Acrobat Reader 4 still does everyhing it needs to do to for me so, I will keep it.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041122

by Al » Wed 22 Dec, 2004 4:43 pm

I used to have Adobe Reader 4 until it got screwed up and I had to uninstall it anf replace it with slow 6.0.2. Wait let me time a pdf application to load... with firefox open... Only 8 seconds... That was faster than I last timed it with the same pdf document

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0

by **Antony** » Thu 23 Dec, 2004 9:28 am

Acrobat Reader or Adobe Reader Mac version :mac:

has always been a standalone application, that is, PDF would be displayed in a separate application.

Now, with version 7 of the Adobe Reader Mac version, PDF can be displayed within the browser. (A bit too Windows way?)

The configuration panel, notice the option of Display PDF in Browser

and a PDF file opened within Safari,

But, I guess such option is still not available in Firefox :-P

(Adobe Reader is not even an option there)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12

by **Don_HH2K** » Thu 23 Dec, 2004 10:07 am

Antony, you might be able to solve your Firefox problem in this manner. (Note that it might be a bit akward, since it's just my Windows directions with Mac phrasing)

Go to your Applications directory, look in the Adobe Reader directory (or wherever you placed Adobe Reader), then Reader under that (if applicable), then Browser. There should be some library files (or whatever Macs use for plugins), copy it to the Firefox plugins directory and try now.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)

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