Abandoning Adobe Reader

Today I wanted to read a PDF. Nothing more than that, just read a damn file. Instead, I got the first use of the Adobe Reader DC, which I may have inadvertently updated to when asked for an update (rather than a complete redesign). But I was OK with it, you know. Adobe Reader was always a lightweight reader of files and the updates have mostly been about security. So now they want to redesign it, what could possibly go wrong? Just rearrange some menus or something, right? Wrong.

I skipped EULAs and bloating features for a while until I got to (surprise!) an online login screen. I didn't want to log in anywhere, I just wanted to read the PDF, so I closed the login popup window. It reopened. I started looking for buttons or links for skipping, cancelling, ignoring, doing it later, but none were there. Quite literally I was locked until I chose to log in. You know what I did? I forcefully closed the process and installed Sumatra PDF reader. 10 seconds later I was reading my damn PDF.

And you know what? I have used Sumatra PDF on other computers in the past. What I found is that, besides some features for PDF that I will never use, like forms and such, Sumatra was better than Adobe Reader. Way faster, that's obvious, but then it read correctly some PDFs that could not be even opened by the default reading application from the company that invented the damn document standard. Once, I remember, we had a weird PDF that we had to wait for about a minute in Adobe Reader in order to render a single page. Sumatra opened it instantly. Not only it is smaller, leaner, faster, better, but Sumatra also reads a lot of other formats: ePub, MOBI, CHM, XPS, DjVu, CBZ, CBR.

Bottom line: I have abandoned the last Adobe tool that I was regularly using on my computer. Will they ever learn?