Dear Adobe: Stop Sucking So Much

What the hell has happened to Adobe software?

At one point they were best-known for producing high-end, professional design software, such as Photoshop, Premiere, InDesign, and Audition. These days, however, they seem better known for producing software that's bloated, overpriced, and horrendously buggy.

Consider the bane of internet users everywhere, Adobe Flash. Having recently performed a recent re-installation of Windows 7, I, of course, merrily went along installing Flash for Firefox. The first thing one notices is that Adobe's download page offers to install crapware (specifically, a McAfee virus scan), which is something I might accept from some small, independent developer, but it's rather pathetic coming from a major developer like Adobe. So I run through the install, and when it finishes, it opens Firefox and displays...a black screen. Normally, Flash is supposed to display an "Installation Complete" page, but because there's a typo in the URL, it just sends me to a black screen. Lovely.

Did I mention that Flash often takes up a large chunk of your memory and CPU time to display a static image?

And then there's horror of Adobe Reader. *shudder*

For basic apps like this, the design philosophy ought to be "Do one thing and do it well." Too bad Adobe obviously never heard of this idea, because Adobe Reader's download package is over 40 megabytes in size, and despite all this bloat, it sucks at reading PDF files! Seriously, why the hell is a PDF Reader forty bloody megabytes in size?

One would think that basic actions such as cutting and pasting would be easily managed by such an application, but once again Adobe surprises and delights by making a complete hash of that as well. Attempting the old CTRL-C + CTRL-V in Adobe Reader has a 1 in 3 chance of working, a 1in 3 chance of failing with an "An internal error occurred" message, and a 1 in 3 chance of just failing inexplicably. This is completely unacceptable, Adobe!

And why must every Adobe product come with an auto-updater, that does little except consume memory? Is your software really being updated that often that you cannot simply have it check for updates every time it starts up? Or how about Adobe Reader Speed Launcher, which also takes up memory, and does nothing except help launch Reader faster, which would only be useful for people who are opening up a metric ton of PDF files.

Or how about Adobe AIR, which gets installed with Reader whether you like it or not, and will probably be useless to the vast majority of users?

Eventually, I just uninstalled every Adobe application on my computer. One can get by perfectly fine with Flash (especially when HTML5 can replicate much of its function), and there are alternative PDF readers out there, like Foxit. Obviously I can't speak for high-end apps like Photoshop or InDesign, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they're every bit as buggy and bloated as the free stuff.

Just say no to Adobe bloatware.