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Adobe PDFs, IE8 and Google

Pardon the geek out moment. I’ve been having problems with Internet Explorer 8 crashing a lot since I installed it last week. I finally put together that it was crashing repeatedly after I access a PDF that I’m testing from Visual Studio, in a web application. When I would launch in debugging mode, the crash would happen. Sometimes it actually closed IE8, but other times I just got a crash notification. Until I restart my laptop, the crash notification continues to happen. I would usually still be able to view the PDF that I was testing in IE8, and the rest of the crashes didn’t seem to fully coincide with the PDF opening.

I tried searching to find out if there was a known issue with IE8 and the .pdf format, but came up empty handed. So, I decided to see if there was an update at Adobe.com. Sure enough, I had Adobe Reader 8.1 (I think, it was 8.? anyway), and 9 is the current version. So, I downloaded the updated version, and began the install.

The downloader tool that Adobe uses told me that it had downloaded 98% of the file, but that it had unpacked 100% of it. The installer portion had begun, and it wanted to close the downloader tool. The downloader tool didn’t think it was done, so I had to allow it to save a file to my desktop, so I could close it and continue the installation.

Since that seemed odd to me, I started thinking, and remembered that the Google Updater was supposed to keep Adobe Reader up to date. I now remember seeing the symbol in my task tray indicating that Adobe was updating several times recently. I think Google was trying to update it, but couldn’t. Regardless, this is one more reason that I really despise PDFs. The software has always been unwieldy, and not very user friendly.

I am guessing that the problem here was that Adobe Reader 8.x isn’t IE8 compatible, and it needed that update. So far, everything is fine since getting Adobe Reader 9 to install. I don’t see a way to get Google to quit being responsible for updating Adobe, but I am also guessing that the problem Google had was the same as mine (that it couldn’t get past the downloader and on to the install), but just invisible to me. So, I’m going to leave Google Updater responsible for the installation, for now.