The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

2025-08-2512:03190137sigwait.org

Latest update: 2025-08-25 11:30:02 At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes. After installation, the program includes…

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Latest update: 2025-08-25 11:30:02

At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes. After installation, the program includes 'AI' (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: 'new' and 'old'.

For comparison, the size of SumatraPDF-3.5.2 installer is 8,246,744 bytes. It has no 'AI', no auto-updater (though it can check for new versions, which I find unnecessary, for anyone sane would install it via scoop anyway), and no ads for 'cloud storage'.

The following chart shows how the Adobe Reader installer has grown in size over the years. When possible, 64-bit versions of installers were used.

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Authors: ag

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Comments

By behnamoh 2025-08-2514:057 reply

Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines.

It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in every possible way, and hides basic editing functionality behind subscriptions.

The trashiest piece of crap software. It's up there with MS Word (which gets progressively more bloated on Mac).

Edit: Added "software" after crap for clarity.

By perching_aix 2025-08-2514:356 reply

> annoying pop ups

Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)

Been on mind a lot lately actually, and I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice. Not from a user perspective anyways (from a dev perspective, it's an easy way out and a "good" way to attention grab... and then not hold).

By egypturnash 2025-08-2516:14

I have a plugin for Illustrator that has several options for helping to make sure your file gets saved regularly. I have it configured to just pop up a polite little warning after fifteen minutes of unsaved work.

Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am.

Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.

By diggan 2025-08-2514:43

> Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)

Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)

By wtallis 2025-08-2520:052 reply

Consider how some developers today talk about "toast" notifications: they understand on some level that calling them pop-ups is bad, but came to a consensus that using a different name was appropriate, rather than not actually making pop-ups in the first place.

By netsharc 2025-08-2520:52

Theme Hospital (a funny 90's game) had a cool way to do notifications, watch on the bottom left as icons pop up: https://youtu.be/26O35BOTVSI?t=693

Some disappear if left unclicked, I guess if the problem is no longer relevant (e.g. a patient bored of waiting leaves), and they can be attended to in any order.

By alexthehurst 2025-08-302:451 reply

But aren’t toasts fundamentally different by being intentionally designed not to block your work?

By wtallis 2025-09-015:36

Pop-up ads from the dark ages of the web largely weren't modal dialog boxes. For the most part, clicking to dismiss them, or clicking to bring the window you cared about back to the foreground was at least as easy as getting rid of "toast" style pop-ups. Both are intentionally distracting, neither is blocking in the sense of preventing you from continuing to interact with the window they partially obscure.

By eviks 2025-08-2514:59

Maybe when you repeatedly try to do an impossible action and don't understand more subtle UI cues? The the popup would be correctly interfering to explain the frustration of the repeated fails?

By ponector 2025-08-2523:18

>> I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice

How about pop-up with 2fa request? Better to have pop-up for push notification than to look for auth app by yourself.

By IChrisI 2025-08-2517:281 reply

"Are you sure you want to close 146 tabs?"

By Timwi 2025-08-2610:211 reply

This is a great example of an unnecessary pop-up. There should just be an obvious way to undo it.

By msephton 2025-08-300:46

There is, but not everybody will know how to find it. Whereas everybody will see the warning alert.

Personally, I wouldn't call this a popup because this was a result of a user action.

By tines 2025-08-2515:581 reply

> Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines.

Bravo. Reminds me of that song that goes something like "When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be me."

By hbn 2025-08-2516:222 reply

I listen to a prank call show where one of his recurring bits is to call people who listed used items for sale to let them know that he's not interested in purchasing their item.

By somat 2025-08-2520:10

"People like to tell you why they're not buying things that they never intended to buy in the first place"

-- the techmoan yt channel

By MortyWaves 2025-08-2516:381 reply

Got a link?

By hbn 2025-08-2517:161 reply

Not sure if I can find a particular episode right now that has that type of call but if you look up Phone Losers of America, or The Snow Plow Show (both are the same guy) you can find lots of Craigslist calls.

Here's a similar idea where he pretends to be calling from AT&T to let them know they have no incoming calls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1sxF6vN3Ho

By MortyWaves 2025-08-2518:55

That’s pretty funny. The UK had something like it called PhoneJackers for a while.

By maxloh 2025-08-2514:434 reply

Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Reader) is still the industry standard for PDF documents, though.

I once found that a PDF file created with OnlyOffice displayed as intended on Chrome, but its embedded font couldn't be recognized or rendered correctly on Acrobat.

I keep Acrobat installed only for verifying the integrity of the PDF files I've created.

By exmadscientist 2025-08-2515:44

What I miss from Acrobat is its Print dialog. Yes, really, the Print dialog. I've had to install the whole bloated mess just to get that dialog.

Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.

By amluto 2025-08-2516:54

It never ceases to amaze me that it’s any sort of industry standard any more. It has, by far, the worst implementation of form filling (filling forms on existing PDFs) of any modern PDF viewer I’ve used. Even the paid version is pretty bad.

By eduction 2025-08-2516:07

100%. I recently took a pdf map from a foreign country, rotated it, and. overlaid English notes using macOS preview. I saved and it opened fine in Preview. But when I tried opening the edited map pdf on iOS in the native pdf viewer it was not rotated so the notes were meaningless. Acrobat Reader for iOS opened it correctly.

So ya looking at binary size alone is not useful. Acrobat may be bloated but there also seems to be some robust code there covering edge cases other readers mess up.

By pseudosavant 2025-08-2515:431 reply

I had to have Adobe Reader installed at my last job because there were official federal and state government PDFs we had to work with that only displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.

By NoMoreNicksLeft 2025-08-2516:011 reply

>Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.

So they intentionally broke the documents for anything not Reader?

By exmadscientist 2025-08-2516:14

There are multiple PDF standards. It is possible to rig up documents that display differently depending on which standards are supported. Acrobat is (or at least used to be) the only thing which truly supports them all.

By znpy 2025-08-2517:01

Back in the days of windows xp i fell in love with Foxit Reader. It just opened PDF documents, no fuss.

By pjmlp 2025-08-268:14

While I share same feelings, I do install it, because I keep getting PDFs that only Acrobat is able to process.

All alternatives always fail short, especially in business context where people get inventive with PDF capabilities.

By ethin 2025-08-2514:07

The only thing I use Adobe Reader/Acrobat for is converting PDFs to text. Literally that's it, and that's only because, for some PDFs, it's much better than pdftotext is.

By robin_reala 2025-08-2514:399 reply

If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.

By nottorp 2025-08-2516:00

Not for power users, for governments :)

I keep the official adobe reader around because it's the only way i can sign some crap for the gov.

It's like a virus, I had to remove update daemons and spam daemons and stuff by hand.

Btw the article says it has "AI" now. Where will it send my tax forms?

By ilamont 2025-08-2514:57

I use Preview for signature annotation, joining PDFs, deleting pages, etc. but in some cases it messes up fillable PDFs - fields aren't aligned properly, or certain math functions won't work.

By kevin_thibedeau 2025-08-2515:041 reply

There are a lot of classic PDF features that are still unimplemented by alternative viewers. For work I have to use Reader for clickable metadata popups that other viewers don't support.

By wildzzz 2025-08-2515:35

There are two big features that Adobe supports that I just don't see common in other readers. First, the schematic capture application I use will generate a PDF of a schematic that has metadata of each component accessible by clicking it. The schematic will show "R179, 100ohms, 0.125W" but clicking to see the metadata will show a part number along with whatever other data the BOM has. No other reader I've used will show this data. Since the schematic PDF serves as our "immutable" copy that goes into our CRM system, it's nice that you have everything you need without having to open Cadence. I believe this is some sort of JavaScript extension to PDF that is likely incredibly exploitable so this is likely why no one else seems to support it (and why Adobe always seems subject to CVEs).

Second, we use Adobe's comments to markup released drawings or other documents for changes. Then both I and QA put our signatures on the PDF and it's either sent to the factory floor for immediate implementation or sent to the document owner for them to incorporate into a new release. Other readers don't always use comments the same way or don't respect the read only attribute that comments and signatures should have.

By vondur 2025-08-2515:10

I've seen that many forms just don't work properly in Preview. I'm not sure if it's due to custom stuff that only Acrobat does or just features that Apple doesn't want to include in preview. But I can always tell with some forms that they've been filled out in Preview on Mac due to how they mangle it.

By diggan 2025-08-2514:424 reply

> joining multiple PDFs together

What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.

By episteme 2025-08-2514:492 reply

Can’t you just drag and drop across preview windows?

By JKCalhoun 2025-08-2514:53

You can — just drag the thumbnails.

The only downside to this, that I am aware of, is that a new PDF is created (rendered into a new PDF context). That can be lossy in some cases (if there are features that Preview does not support that get "dropped on the floor") and it is possible for the resulting PDF to be larger than the original(s).

By diggan 2025-08-2515:04

Woah, page-by-page? I wasn't aware of that, I guess I'll give it a try the next time I'm in front of a Mac and need to join PDFs again :)

By wonger_ 2025-08-2516:29

qpdf is usually my PDF wrangler of choice:

  qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf 2,3 b.pdf 7-23 -- out.pdf

By mynameismon 2025-08-2514:471 reply

For those who have an installation of LaTeX: It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

By diggan 2025-08-2515:121 reply

> It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"?

If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)

By fooofw 2025-08-2516:42

pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be:

    pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf

I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme).

[1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam

By jbn 2025-08-2613:44

my go-to tool for this is pdftk.

See https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-examples/

By D13Fd 2025-08-2514:57

Preview is OK and better than Reader. But PDF Expert is excellent in every way, and is a dramatic improvement on both Adobe Acrobat and Preview. It’s so weird that they won’t release a PC version.

By staticman2 2025-08-2516:26

Sometimes Mac users need to communicate with Non Mac users and it's helpful to be using the same PDF reader software so you know what you send them is the same as what they'll see.

By insane_dreamer 2025-08-2516:03

Love Preview but it doesn’t work with all PDFs. I still have to switch to Acrobat regularly.

By behnamoh 2025-08-2514:491 reply

You're right, why would anyone use Adobe Reader instead of the built-in Preview on Mac? Though Preview has its own limitations.

By JKCalhoun 2025-08-2514:512 reply

How does Preview suck? The only thing that comes to mind is that it is missing some advanced PDF features that involve JavaScript (which, to some, might be seen as an asset).

By NoMoreNicksLeft 2025-08-2516:071 reply

About 1 in 15 of the pdfs I view in Preview have some sort of "corrupt jpeg" artifacting on the first page. (These are scans of old books, magazines, typically.) There will be a diagonal staircase of green blocks, each what I assume is the DCT 8x8 size going all the way down the page, along with what looks like a missing color channel. The same pdf if opened with Firefox will look fine (so pdfjs gets it right). This has gone on for years, something to do with MacOS's own rendering of pdfs (so trivially switching to another app is unlikely to fix it). I have no idea what this is, I can't even think of a good description with which to google the problem...

By JKCalhoun 2025-08-2517:43

Love to see an example PDF. (I'd like to send it to the PDF/ImageIO team at Apple.)

By behnamoh 2025-08-2515:01

Ever since 3 years ago, every time I open a PDF in Preview it somehow scales it wrong, so swiping left and right jiggles the PDF... (Not that I swipe left/right intentionally, but that happens when swiping up/down). I alway have to zoom out a bit so the document correctly fits the screen and swiping left/right gets disabled.

By tech234a 2025-08-2514:121 reply

Ads and many online features can be removed before installation of Adobe Reader by customizing the installer using the Adobe Reader Customization Wizard for Windows [1], where there is an optional labeled "Disable Upsell" [2]. There might also be a version for macOS [3]. It might also just be possible to just directly set the appropriate "FeatureLockDown" options in the registry/preferences in your system [4].

[1]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/in...

[2]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/on...

[3]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/AdminGuid...

[4]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/PrefRef/W...

By 7bit 2025-08-2515:26

Or I install an alternative where I don't have to do this.

By winkelwagen 2025-08-2514:374 reply

At this point i don’t trust large programs anymore. Someone recommended to use Lens to manage a k8 cluster. That application was a 600mb install file and if I’m not mistaken double that after installing on a Mac. Desktop software has become so crazy. Meanwhile the blender download is 300mb. It is not that I’m looking for over optimized software. But a 2gb k8 console doesn’t spark trust in the developers to begin with.

By hbn 2025-08-2516:33

It's not much better on mobile. I just checked a few apps on my iPhone: Instagram, TikTok, Duolingo are all about 500mb each. And many of these apps are gigabytes when you use them for a bit and it caches things.

I just cleared Snapchat's cache a few days ago, I barely use the app, and it's somehow taking up 5GB on my phone.

By Self-Perfection 2025-08-2622:08

Just a week ago I reported 37 MB of wasted space in Debian package with Lens https://forums.k8slens.dev/t/debian-package-stores-lima-twic...

They promised to fix this.

By znpy 2025-08-2517:03

I miss octant so much. It was really great, it was one of those 80/20 apps.

Nowadays I, unironically, mostly use kubectl. I gave k9s a try but i can't make it stick to me, really...

By mdallastella 2025-08-2516:02

You can take a look at k9s: https://k9scli.io/