Adobe Acrobat

Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with Adobe Acrobat, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 14 complaints

Reader looks slow and poor and occupies excessive space on the user's machine2026-01-19
Mobile PDF editors are bloated and require cloud login just to edit one line2026-01-15
Signing PDFs is a hassle; sign-in demanded to open a file and signing options are clumsy2025-10-15
Scrolling with j overshoots past page end into nonexistent blank space; J does not align to page top2025-10-15
Prominent AI button sits on the PDF with no explanation and no way to remove it2024-09-20
Syntax errors require deleting and retyping scripts; debugger offers almost no help or hints2023-09-30
The resulting interface for a third-party PDF reader is ugly and clunky2023-02-08
Acrobat Reader is sluggish, lacks smooth scrolling and GPU acceleration, bloated2023-02-08
Slow to page through documents and generally poor to use2021-04-04
Acrobat is slow and bloated, and a PDF reader feels needlessly complicated2012-12-16
Acrobat integration locks up Chrome tabs and crashes them, and PDF links must be downloaded instead of opened2010-11-05
Acrobat Reader is slow and bloated compared to Preview2010-02-02
Silently installs Adobe AIR without notice or any option to decline2009-02-18
Acrobat Reader opens PDFs in a slow, annoying pop-up window on Linux2008-06-21