Adobe Acrobat Download Usability

I wanted to download the Adobe® Acrobat® Reader® for a friend who lives in the boonies and is relegated to a dialup. But the Adobe site seemed to be insisting I use an online installer, that smallish program you download to get the big one. I hate those--you can never save the file for giving to friends, or for yourself if you need to re-install.

After a bit of thrashing, I clicked on the text only page and got the FULL Adobe Reader program download, all 13 steaming Megs of it.

Oh, tangentially here, it seems there is a move afoot at Adobe to call it the "Adobe Reader" and lose the Acrobat part. Well, I have news for their marketing department: I still sometimes refer to a supermarket near my apartment as Skaggs, which is 3 names old. I also like the triply-register-marked name so much I did it here too.

To avoid gratuitous negativity, I should mention that the much-needed File, Save As option finally showed up in version 5. It's possible they've smoothed out other rough usability edges from prior versions.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Monday, April 14, 2003 (Link)

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