Bloat illustrated

December 16, 2008

I just noticed this:

A number of things are wrong here. The first is that Adobe Updater apparently didn’t realize that Adobe Help Viewer 1.1 could replace Adobe Help Viewer 1.0. Why do I assume that it can? Because if you open the package for an Adobe application and root around, you’ll find that the help files are just HTML pages.

The second problem: The two versions of Adobe Help Viewer don’t seem to recognize each other’s files. If I run 1.0, I get the help for Adobe Reader; 1.1 gives me the help for Photoshop Elements. If I remove 1.0, Adobe Reader’s help function stops working entirely.

The third issue is that version 1.0 was correctly installed as Intel native, but 1.1 is a Universal binary. If the installer could get it right, why couldn’t Adobe’s fancy updater?

Fourthly, even allowing for 1.1 having two copies of all the code (let’s call it 2x400KB), what’s the cause of the other 2MB of bloat? Running the two versions, the only functional difference seems to be that the search box was moved in 1.1, and now allows you to search across all your help files at once. Not 2MB of improvement, in my view. And given that the OS provides an HTML renderer and a full text search engine with HTML support, what’s the other 2.6MB of code in that help viewer doing?

If I run Adobe Reader, it tells me that version 9 is available, and instructs me to click to download it. However, clicking doesn’t do anything. The Adobe updater doesn’t seem to know that Reader 9 is available either.

All in all, it looks like Adobe have some serious quality control and software engineering issues. What’s the point in bloating your applications with custom help and custom installers, rather than using the standard OS facilities, if your custom reinvented wheels are square ones?

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