Adobe Acrobat Updates Broken

Adobe® Acrobat® Reader® has long been a whipping boy for usability types. In fact, here on Zen Haiku, I've dissed Acrobat before. Well, I'm (re)joining the fray.

I went to look at a PDF file, and this is what I saw (shrunk down a bit to fit in my web site):

adobe-acrobat-sucks.gif

Why isn't the update automatically selected? What's up with making me pick an update when there's only one? It's an update I didn't even want! Like most people, I just wanted the stupid update over with, so I hit Update and received an error message about nothing being selected.

Just as bad is the way this Adobe update window usually disappears below my web browser, apparently crashing it. It got so bad in the past with the Adobe® Photoshop® Album Starter Edition constantly being suggested that I actually downloaded and installed the damn thing, although I never use it.

My current solution is to "File, Save As" PDF files and look at them outside of Firefox, but of course, a few enterprising web sites have javascript links that break this approach.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Thursday, March 10, 2005 (Link)

Comments

Posted by industrial musician Thursday, March 10, 2005 at 10:23 AM

Yeah, you would think they could automate that better somehow.

Posted by Lewis Moten Monday, March 21, 2005 at 10:24 PM

You would think that a QA team would catch this one immediately. It just goes to show that they are not putting the users experience first.

Posted by Chad Lundgren Monday, April 4, 2005 at 01:55 PM

Firefox, for some but not all people, disagrees with the Adobe Reader, crashing both Firefox and the Adobe Reader.

I ran across a simple method to fix this: I hit Tools, Options, Download, and deleted the entry for Adobe Acrobat. I went and clicked on a PDF link, and told it to always Save PDFs. Now I can view PDFs in Adobe Reader proper, which is the least bad usabilty.