Read on as Appligent’s CEO Duff Johnson takes the Adobe Reader “Bloatware Bloviation” to task … “For those who still insist that applications can be measured by the time required for download or size of the installation, tell me how long does it take to deal with a PDF that breaks your preferred “lightweight” viewer? Somehow, that metric never makes it into the lazy claims of ‘bloatware’.”

I’ve just loaded up the latest release candidate of Windows 7 Ultimate (version 6, build 7100) — it was an upgrade on the previous (semi-dead-like-a-slug) 32-bit Vista installation. Packed it with the latest Adobe Reader (9.1 at the time, and 42mb download) for Windows Vista. Tried my best to load a PDF online and … no change. Right now, if you’re looking for a solution, try Foxit Reader…

A few days ago I tested Adobe Reader 9 on Windows 7 and didn’t discover any major issues. Adobe Reader worked correctly despite the fact that Windows 7 is not yet a supported platform. Today I thought I’d try the same with Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro.

Installing software on an unsupported operating system isn’t usually a good idea. In fact, it is quite often fraught with risk, as a lot of people found in 2006 when they tried to install software on Windows Vista that was originally been built for Windows XP and hadn’t been updated yet. Luckily — so far — it seems like it is going to be a far smoother transition from Windows Vista to Windows 7.