Nominations for the 2006 Bloatware of the Year. I can’t help myself, I must nominate Adobe this time for:
Adobe Acrobat Reader, a simple but necessary utility that every year expands in size, gets slower to boot and hogs more system resources. The latest version is a 28MB download for a simple utility that takes even longer to fire up than it does to download it’s oversized files. The only thing that could still be called portable in a Portable Document File is now due to the fact you can buy a 4 Gig USB drive that fits in your pocket. You sure wouldn’t e-mail one to your buddy on dial-up!
But wait, in combination with our M$ slavering Korporate bureaucrats, the gov’t has managed to put all their services online and invented the 60MB PDF of a permit that Farmer John must download over his 26K party-line, fill out and fax back to the single 800 number that serves the whole province if he wants the schoolbus to stop at his place and get the kids!
I nominate Acrobat Reader even ahead of Publisher2003 which I originally considered when a lady showed me her ugly web pages with two color stripes, 150 words and six pitures to a page that weighed in at over 95KB per html file.