Adobe and Macromedia Shareholders Approve Merger

Steve Nixon wrote to mention a CRN article discussing the shareholder approval of a merger between Adobe and Macromedia. From the article: "The deal, announced in early April, is slated to close this fall pending government approval. On Thursday, the companies said nearly 99 percent of the outstanding Adobe and Macromedia shares voted were cast in favor of the deal. Adobe's powerful PDF franchise and Macromedia's ubiquitous Flash presence on PCs, Macs and other devices could make the combined company a prodigious counterweight even to Microsoft, several observers said."

obFlashBlockLink

[Anonymous Coward]

... And we will have one extension [mozilla.org] to thank for never seeing a Flash ad.

(OK, maybe two [mozilla.org])

Re:Imagine...

[MBCook]

I've got to weigh in on this. I switched to a Mac early this year. The Preview application is FANTASTIC. It does everything I need to view PDFs, it's FAST, and works great. I've loved it. Every time I had to use a PC since then with a PDF file, I've been unable to understand why Acrobat reader is so slow.

Then I installed Adobe CS 2 on my Mac. It came with... Acrobat!

Well, to be helpful, it nicely replaced Preview as the default way to view PDFs. That meant that if I was surfing and clicked on a link to a PDF, instead of it popping up almost instantly (like another HTML page) as it did before, the WHOLE COMPUTER SLOWED DOWN and Safari almost locked up for a few seconds as it opened. Then when it was open it was slow. VERY slow.

I quickly found out how to remove the program from Safari's plugins so that it wouldn't cause that again. Acrobat absolutely sucks performance.

But things get worse. I have to run Virtual PC on my Mac and occasionally have to open a PDF in it for various reasons. Now Virtual PC says my computer is the equivalent of 300 MHz. Launching Acrobat basically locks Virtual PC up for 2-3 minutes as it launches (I let it have 512MB of ram, so that's not the problem) and then trying to USE the program is like when I found a 386 running Windows 95. Sure it WORKED, but I didn't have that kind of time to spare.

I can understand why Photoshop takes so long to load (although I think it could delay the loading of all those plugins until I trued to use one). But Acrobat is a performance black-hole for some reason I can't figure out.

So, my response to your questions: This isn't a Windows thing. It's an Acrobat thing. Find a replacement for Acrobat. I love Preview, but there must be something better for Windows too.

Re:Imagine...

[hazem]

This article shows how to do "liposuction" on acrobat and make it load much faster by removing a bunch of the plugins. If you lose functionality you need, find the plugin and put it back in the plugins directory.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11041 [theinquirer.net]

It works for both the reader and the full acrobat.

The essence of the instructions are:
        * From the Start->Run windows menu, Open the "x:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader" folder, where x is the right drive letter.
        * Find the plug_ins folder and rename it plug_ins_disabled
        * Create a new folder named plug_ins
        * Copy the following files from "plug_ins_disabled" to "plug_ins": EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api

Re:Imagine...

[panaceaa]

Or you can upgrade to Adobe Reader 7.0 [adobe.com], which loads plug-ins only as they're needed. For me it loads about 5 times faster than the old Reader versions (5, and especially 6).

Re:Imagine...

[delus10n0]

FireFox has major threading issues anyhow. Go to any website, and start right clicking->'T' (open in tab) on every link you can find. Behold the slowness!

Re:Imagine...

[Skuld-Chan]

Why do people always take the hard way out? Just go into edit > preferences > internet > uncheck display pdf in browser.

That little feature has been there since at least acrobat 3 when the first browser plugin came about.

With 6 and 7 there both package components too - so you can do a msiexec /i acropro.msi (or whatever the package is called) REMOVE=AcrobatBrowserIntegration and your done.

Isn't windows cool?