Speeding up Adobe Acrobat Startup
I'm very fond of the concept of Adobe Acrobat - being able to share a single PDF file that contains a non-volatile representation of a document, that you can view on-screen or via a printer without worrying about formatting issues caused by different fonts, operating systems or printer drivers. But I'm getting increasingly infuriated by the implementation: amongst other things, by the slow loading times and increasing bloat in the Reader software. I frequently have to wait 10-20 seconds for the application to load when all I wanted to do was view a single page. I don't want to complete an electronic form, verify a digital signature, print to a remote location, or manipulate a digital photo, so why do I have to wait for nearly 20 plug-ins to load before I can use the document. This is simply poor application design: most of these plug-ins could be loaded as a background task for starters, and the interface doesn't even offer a way to disable them.
As I browsed around the directory structure under C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader, I discovered there's a subdirectory called Optional that contains a readme with the following text: "Put unused plug-ins in the optional directory." Super, I thought and promptly moved all the plug-ins. Hey presto - Acrobat Reader immediately transformed itself back into the speedy, lightweight tool that I loved back in version 3.
Searching around the web to see whether this was a safe thing to have done, I discovered this post from Darren Norton over a year ago with the same information. So I'm behind the times, certainly, but I suspect I'm not alone in having missed this "feature". I posted a quick mail to the "Cool Stuff" distribution list internally within Microsoft and received a number of replies from delighted colleagues, so I thought I'd share it here.
Comments
- Anonymous
November 24, 2004
Nice, I'll remove them all at work.
I tried here at home (moved everything out of the plugins folder), but pdfs no longer load in the browser and that will bring howls from my girlfriend. - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
I did not know about this hidden feature, but I had discovered a utility that speeds up Acrobat startup by disabling some of the plugins. You can find the link to download at http://turkerkeskinpala.com/blog/index.php?p=17.
Thanks for this tip though...
Turker - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
I'd leave updater.api & weblink.api in order to get updates (otherwise missing from menu). - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
I tried removing some of the plugins and found that reader starting throwing errors at startup.
After this, I repaired my instalation and disabled the startup screen. This drastically improved the startup time.
regards,
Abhishek. - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
Tim,
something I picked up that seems to work, hold down the Shift key before you click on the PDF
Cheers,
Steve C. - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
Speeds load time but.... I've been wondering why no one has written a thin PDF viewer. Perhaps it has been done and I'm looking in the wrong places. - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
Thanks! it works like a charm. - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
Wow! Thank you! - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
You star !! Thanks.
(That delay annoyed me as well!) - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
Thanx!
I open the reader about 10 times each day and
it is about 10 seconds faster.
Our company has about 50 developer, which
work more than 200 days each year.
10x10x200x50 == 34 days per 8 hours. - Anonymous
November 24, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
November 25, 2004
helenius » - Anonymous
October 03, 2006
Like most other techies, whenever I install Adobe’s Acrobat Reader I also uninstall most of the pointless