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In the normal run of things I rank Adobe Flash as one of the most hateful creations in the history of the planet, universe or whatever. Strangely my next most hateful creation is Adobe Acrobat Reader. Coincidence?

Mind you, every now and then something comes along to remind you that maybe Adobe Flash is not so bad after all. And maybe, just maybe there is a use for it other than useless website intros and You*.com videos.

So here is a virtual hamster: http://abowman.com/google-modules/hamster/

But just to prove that Adobe Acrobat is still hateful, the latest version of Acrobat Reader weighs in at 33.5MB. To put that into comparison Open Office can create the damn things and it’s free! And it is only a 142MB (JRE Bundled) download but you get an entire office suite of software! Word processor, spreadsheet and you get the idea. You get more than just something for just reading documents!

As if that isn’t hateful enough just consider that Open Office is considered to be among the slowest pieces of software available – yet it loads up in about 30 seconds compared to about 3 minutes for Acrobat reader on the exact same P.C! Grrr..

But if it is just the ability to read PDF documents that you are after then FoxIt Reader is free and only weighs in at 2.57MB and takes but a split second to open.

And it is better than having to download a 200MB update for a program that was originally 33.5MB to download.