Last night I wanted to install Acrobat Reader 7 on my laptop. Normally installing a program in Mac OS X is just a matter of downloading a .dmg (Disk Image) file, opening it, and dragging the application out of there to the Applications folder. Sometimes the .dmg has a package installer in it. So I wasn’t too surprised when I found that the .dmg file I’d downloaded from Adobe had a package installer in it. But when I ran the package installer, it didn’t just copy some files from within itself to places on the destination drive. Oh no, that would be too normal. Instead, the package installer fired up a Adobe download tool that downloaded another freaking .dmg file! And that .dmg file had a package installer that actually installed the Acrobat Reader.
Can somebody please explain why they wouldn’t just let you download the Acrobat Reader installer package, instead of making you download an installer installer?
Rone, you want to comment?
My guess is that they want to keep statistics on how often it is installed, rather than how often it is downloaded. I wonder if it reported anything else back when you ran it.
I’d imagine the first installer can check back home to see if there’s a newer version lying around, patches, etc. But Adobe’s had craptacular downloadability of their stuff for years and years, most prominently due to the bloat. So, yeah, they suck.