April 19, 2004

Curious, George: Acrobat vs. Mozilla why does acrobat hate my copy of mozilla? on my laptop opening a .pdf on a website slows my machine to a crawl. mozilla just freezes, blank screen, no response from the program for several minutes at least.

here's the gory details: winXP professional, 1.8 ghz athlonXP mobile, 512 meg ram, acrobat 6 professional, mozilla 1.6. this didn't happen with acro 4, but 4 ain't winXP compatible, and 6 just eats memory like a pig. the only way to get around this seems to be opening acrobat first, then clicking the link. as a student who spends a lot of time reading / downloading .pdf files from science journal websites, this is a drag. similar results on my home system (same programs, same OS, same memory, slightly faster processor). similar fix - open acrobat before clicking link or open it after mozilla chokes to kick it back into working. anybody know why this happens? or how to fix it? i know the reader has lots of plug-ins, but i'm not thrilled about disabling most plug-ins for the full program - i do generate .pdf and would like the plugins to remain available. and if i install the acro reader (which i assume won't be such a resource hog) will it be the default web plug-in, and acro full will still open the files when double-clicked, or what?

posted by caution live frogs 20 years ago
  • Check out pdfzone.com. The site, and their mailing lists, are very informative. Also, you might try manually setting the program associated with PDF files to Reader... Hope this helps!
  • I have a very similar setup frogs, but only using the reader and w/ no problem. I'd say you suggested the fix yourself with that one - but to generate them you'd have to open the full version first I guess. *shrug*
  • I can't be any help, but I have the exact same problem on my laptop. It's sure annoying as hell
  • i have the same problem and the same setup.
  • I just don't click on .pdfs these days.
  • Are you talking about Adobe Reader? I use FireFox/Bird/Phoenix, and have run into similar problems -- what I was able to discern is that the auto-update option for Reader stalls the application. After the pdf failed to load, and locked up FireFox, I opened up the Task Manager and killed the offending process. After I did this, the Reader auto-update dialog appeared. I selected the option to never check for updates and haven't had a problem since.
  • in my humble and (likely) unwanted opinion: .pdf's in general, and acrobat in specific, are the suckingest sucks that ever sucked. boy do i hate them. every browser, every platform.
  • I always save .pdfs to disk and open them in Acrobat.
  • There's a lengthy thread dealing with this topic in the MozillaZine Forums. I can't vouch for the efficacy of the fixes. I tried to find a Windows version of the pdf browser plugin Mac people use, but no luck. Have you considered using something like wget to grab them? It's nice and fast.
  • We all hate your copy of Mozilla. We hates it.
  • dirtdirt - seems that .pdf is a good file format for a lot of reasons (looks the same everywhere, mostly) but too many people use it to save them work - why put something on the web and in print, in different formats, when you can just format it once and have it the same? well, 'cause the web isn't print. putting a .pdf onto a website as content is a dumb idea. content online ought to be an html document. putting an exact copy of a journal article, so i can get a nice reprint without photocopying, and have searchable text and be able to export figures to use in lab meetings or presentations? that is worthwhile. and what it is supposed to be for. which is why i like it. i think too many people can't get a website to look like print media, and that freaks them out 'cause they aren't used to thinking about it in a non-print format. hard to give up pixel-level control of object placement and exactly which fonts to use, but that's the web. thanks for the advice, all - i'm trying just putting the reader in for web viewing and disabling all reader plugins. hopefully it will leave my copy of 6 full alone.
  • and - for the record - the adobe website is utter crap. i hate it. renders slow, code is a jumble of unintelligible mismatched crap, and they won't let me just friggin' download anything - it has to be a three step process with some interminable wait because they can't just use a self-extracting zip file like everyone else. ah, adobe. how you conflict my soul. love photoshop. tolerate illustrator. deal with acrobat. hate the website.
  • I use Adobe Reader SpeedUp to avoid loading a lot of the unnecessary plugins. Adobe Reader now loads significantly faster.