I thought i'd make my first post for 2005 a real positive one.
I noticed a few posts talking about the recent release of Adobe Reader 7.0 and that it's "much faster". (Most of those posts seem kinda negative, so I won't reference them here <grin>)
Since we've recently started using PDFs as a daily part of our ASP.NET based product (as opposed to an occasional report), that slow loading time was an issue, and I really didn't want to have to ask people to install yet another product to what was supposed to be a thin client solution <grin>
By default, Acrobat 7.0 is fast. Loading PDFs stand-alone is almost instant, as is browser loading. I was able to open up Microsoft's "Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures". and be viewing the first page before I barely had time to lift the mouse. Memory footprint is pretty good (ok, good being 31 MB to load up said 900 page file, but still, I take memory footprint with a grain of salt when I've almost 2 GB free.... It might be different on a different machine)
Sweet!
To gainsay the naysyers (ok, double negative...) Once loaded in the browser, it does stay resident, but only until the browser is closed. After the browser is closed (seems to take about 3 minutes for it to notice), it goes away. While resident, once it loses focus, the memory drops pretty dramatically. Also, the PDF speedup program added to startup is not reader. And whatever it is, it doesn't actually stay resident (unless it attaches to some other program) What it appears to do is make sure the settings are correct so things can load quickly. Even if you remove it from startup, things load pretty quickly. And removing the plugins doesn't seem to do anything to loading time or memory footprint. They must be loaded on demand.
Looks like they listened to peoples complaints, and addressed them pretty well. And there looks to actually be a bevy of new features on top of all of that, so again.... Sweet!
Happy new year, all!!!!