Disabling Adobe Acrobat PDF viewer in Safari 4
[UPDATE There’s an easier way to do this. Launch Acrobat. Go into Preferences -> Internet and uncheck “Display PDF in browser using: ...” That should do it (at least in CS3). OTOH, moving it around on the command line is very satisfying…]
If you’ve installed Adobe CS2 or CS3 on your Mac, you’ve probably experienced it’s aggressive approach to Safari.
It installs its own Acrobat plug-in viewer that gets invoked by Safari (and other apps) when you view a PDF.
I find that really annoying – it takes forever for the initial page to load, i’s much slower than the built-in PDF viewing, and takes up a huge chunk of memory). Damn you Adobe!
So, if you want to disable it, here’s what to do (assuming you have admin privileges).
1. Launch Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal)
2. Type:
# sudo mkdir "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins.disabled"
# sudo mv "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin" "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins.disabled"
Now if you restart Safari and go look at a PDF, life will again be fast. If you decide you are becoming too productive, you can always revert the change:
# sudo mv "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins.disabled/AdobePDFViewer.plugin" "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins"
Enjoy!
I don’t think you can rely on Safari’s ability to accurately preview PDF files; particularly if there are several layers in the PDF (e.g. made with Adobe Illustrator and saved as PDF). Apple’s Preview, for example, mashes them all together into one layer and you see all layers at once. Acrobat will interpret the layers correctly and separate pages accurately.
Most of time time, Safari does a fine job for me. You can always open it in Acrobat if necessary. But I prefer to optimize for the nominal case (in my instance). YMMV.
Thanks for the tip. I too was being driven nuts by the bloated slow-a.. nature of Adobe’s pdf option. For the 0.1% of pdfs that Preview has an issue with I will take its speed everytime over Acrobat!
Opening a PDF on my Mac pro 3ghz with 8gb ram would slow safari to a crawl, beachball city. I have adobe acrobat pro via CS3 and am really pissed it’s this poor.
Have shut it down as per your recommendation