Why doesn't Adobe Reader 7.0+ work on my computer?

[Tristam]

Not a big deal since I simply uninstalled the latest version of Adobe Reader and reinstalled 6.0.1., but this problem plagued my old desktop and now it happened with my laptop. Whenever I try to open a PDF with AR 7.0+ it simply doesn't load; whenever I try to load a PDF into a browser window it freezes up.

[TVC15]

Adobe Reader is pretty much consistently one of the poorest major applications out there.  I've never used a version that wasn't either extremely buggy, slow, performance hogging, or completely unstable.  I guess Adobe puts their newb coders to work on it to gauge whether they can work on a real product.

[muckhole]

Have you tried Foxit? I rarely have call to use PDF's, so I don't know if it would be appropriate feature-wise for you if you need it for work, but it's small and fast.

[laesperanzapaz]

can anyone answer why PDF files take so long to load, and hold up the browser? i have pdf download now [for firefox] so it downloads it for me instead of opening on the browser, but still...