For the longest time I avoided installing Adobe Reader on my various Macs. The stock Preview.app on the Mac is both very fast and can read 99.9% of PDF files that I throw at it. Very rarely would I encounter a PDF file it couldn't read, but I never felt compelled to install Adobe Reader just for those handful of files.
I recently had to fill out a Very Important Government Document that Preview.app declared it couldn't handle. Moreover, since it was a long and tedious form that was easy to make mistakes on, filling it out using Adobe Reader's form filling functionality actually made sense. So I installed Adobe Reader.
Adobe Reader is slooooow. It actually has a plug-ins of it's own, although I've no idea what functionality they provide that I might care about, nor where I'd get new ones if I wanted to. It has more options than the rest of my Mac applications combined. This is the Preferences Pane for Adobe Reader:
I will remind you that Adobe Reader is a PDF reader and not an authoring tool, First Person Shooter or Geographical Information System.
It's also installs itself as a web browser plug-in for reading PDF files. This means that when I open a PDF file on the internets, Safari now freezes for about 15 seconds while Adobe Reader contacts its mothership in the next galaxy.
You can save yourself a lot of grief by just disabling the Adobe Reader plug-in. Here's how you do this:
I recently had to fill out a Very Important Government Document that Preview.app declared it couldn't handle. Moreover, since it was a long and tedious form that was easy to make mistakes on, filling it out using Adobe Reader's form filling functionality actually made sense. So I installed Adobe Reader.
Adobe Reader is slooooow. It actually has a plug-ins of it's own, although I've no idea what functionality they provide that I might care about, nor where I'd get new ones if I wanted to. It has more options than the rest of my Mac applications combined. This is the Preferences Pane for Adobe Reader:
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| Adobe Reader Preferences Pane (not a joke) |
I will remind you that Adobe Reader is a PDF reader and not an authoring tool, First Person Shooter or Geographical Information System.
It's also installs itself as a web browser plug-in for reading PDF files. This means that when I open a PDF file on the internets, Safari now freezes for about 15 seconds while Adobe Reader contacts its mothership in the next galaxy.
You can save yourself a lot of grief by just disabling the Adobe Reader plug-in. Here's how you do this:
- Quit Safari.
- Open your Macintosh HD.
- Find the Library folder and enter it.
- Find the Internet Plug-Ins folder and enter it.
- Look for a file called AdobePDFViewer.plugin and move it into the Disabled Plug-Ins folder.
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| Disabling the Adobe Reader Plug-In (click to expand) |
- Restart Safari and test with a PDF file. You should now be back to simple, clean and fast PDF viewing.
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