It downloads garbage to my hard drive, but it is not garbage that gets in the way of my work. I do not use a pdf plugin, because I want to download my scientific papers to my hard drive. Not to mention, those plugins make pdf viewing miserable.
I hate unwarned links to PDF’s. No matter what system/browser I’m on, they never seem to work cleanly. If I need to look at something in such a file, I’d much rather be warned so I can download it directly and open it in the proper reader, rather than fuck up my browser until I can get it to cancel the download/view operation.
There’s been a marked improvement in the last two versions of AR. The older versions used to freeze up computers if they crashed upon loading. I haven’t had that happen for a while, but it used to happen 75% of the time I tried to load a PDF, even with a brand new computer.