I don’t get it, every time someone links to a .pdf here they put a big “WARNING - PDF”. But when I click .pdf links my browser (Chrome) just opens them in a new tab. It doesn’t hurt me.
I’m guessing it can cause some kind of complication/crashing if you don’t have the right browser plug-in?
I could see someone posting a warning when PDFs were shiny and new and not everyone had Adobe Reader, but that was a loooong time ago. I haven’t seen a computer in years where AR wasn’t installed.
It causes significant slowdown when opening a PDF file through a browser, for some people. My machine at work really hates opening them and complains bitterly when I do.
My computer has intermittent problems with Adobe Reader, particularly when it’s being done through a browser. It also used to engage in this unique discourse with me where I would try to open a PDF file and as I recall AR would pop up saying that it couldn’t open PDF files in the browser, go get a cup of coffee or whatever it is Reader does, and then open it anyway. Also sometimes when I close it it doesn’t feel like actually going away, so it sticks around sucking down memory and I have to put it out of its misery it with Task Manager.
I use the PDF format a lot because it’s so common, especially when I’m sending things to clients or want to use vectors. It’s not really that hard to look at where a link is pointing and see it’s a PDF file, so it’s not like I need warnings, but I can appreciate that it’s nice to know what you’re getting yourself into before you click.
Really? Are they computers from the Triassic period? My computer is about 6-7 years old and there is no slowdown.
I don’t understand the “WARNING - PDF” notation, but I do appreciate knowing that a link is to a PDF rather than an HTML page, especially if I’m just idly surfing.
I’ve heard that as high as 20% of computer users worldwide, and possibly 10% in the U.S., are on dial-up. My coworker is still on dial-up (though she’s planning to get cable access any time now).
My computer is fairly normal and can handle a lot of stuff (though I’m not entirely sure how old it is. I got it used. But I almost never have problems with it being obsolete) but not .pdf files.
I have adobe reader installed and occasionally, there’s very little problem (as in, everything refuses to respond for about 30 seconds, but then it opens and things go back to normal.) But most of the time, it takes f…o…r…e…v…e…r to open if it opens at all… like ten minutes, no lie. And while it’s loading, nothing else in my browser works. Half the time, it crashes my browser completely. Sometimes my computer needs to be restarted. And even if it does load okay, it goes haywire when I try to close it. Things slow to a crawl and it takes about 5 minutes to close.
I would be okay with this sometimes… a calculated risk when I’m not really doing anything and really want to see what’s on that pdf. But it really really annoys me when I’m sort of idly clicking and someone has linked to a .pdf without labeling it. And I find myself in for a headache I didn’t bargain for to see something that 99% of the time was not worth it.
I guess now that I think about it, my computer also has problems with multiple user profiles… it slows down significantly when I have the guest account activated. So it may just be because it’s from the triassic period. Still, I appreciate it when people label .pdf files because it saves me some fist-shaking and time.
Because Adobe Reader is a piece of shit that by default tries to load a pdf in the browser but freezes the browser as it loads. Warning someone lets them bypass this flawed plug-in by saving it to their computer and reading it from there.
I’m on dial-up. I set my download manager to download .PDFs and then load them independent of the browser.
One of the only good things about Vista is that it plays with Adobe Reader a lot better than ME and XP did. 1 in 2 pdf files would cause my computer to lock up when I opened them on ME or XP. OTOH, I suppose it could be Adobe that’s improved and the timing is conicidental.
As Grumman noted, it’s not the quality of the computer but the shittiness of the browser plug-in.
It’s not a “fear”. I think you meant why are people annoyed by PDF links?
For anyone using firefox…
tools->addons->plugins tab-> disable button on the acrobat plugin
No more worries about links.
Why someone thought a badly programmed browser plugin would be a good idea I’ll never know.
Ditto. I hate PDfs. I have a reasonably speedy PC at home and work. Still hate the things. I can understand why some people use them but another thing that pisses me off is that I encounter websites which use PDFs when there is no apparent reason to do so.
Slee
Or maybe it was programmed just fine for a large range of PC setups, but may impact those with oddball settings, oddball hardware, oddball whatever…
I don’t even have the reader on my work computer. And since regular web pages regularly crash the browser, I wouldn’t trust it to load them even if I could.
I appreciate the warning.
I hate reading PDF’s in the browser so my computer automatically downloads PDF’s. I don’t want more garbage on my computer than I have to have.
I have NEVER met a pdf I can’t crash when viewing from the web. This has spanned at least 5 years and at least a dozen different computers. While the pdf loads if you accidentally click the mouse and BAM it crashes. Maybe it’s just my bad luck or Firefox, but when multitasking and using pdfs it crashes very frequently.
The computers at work are running a version of Adobe Acrobat from 2003. Most new .pdf files will crash the entire system, requiring a reboot that takes around 10 minutes. There is no tech support, nor are they willing to give us drones the admin password to update to a new version of Adobe. Therefore, .pdf files are definitely something we don’t open unless we have to, and only then by saving it to the desktop rather than opening in a browser window.