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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed Apps
I just realized that by disabling all unnecessary plugins (which for me means everything except the Search plugin) in Reader 6 (in Finder, Get Info on Reader 5 and select Plug-ins), I could have tremendous speed and memory gains at startup. After disabling the extra plugins, Reader 6 dropped from 14 bounces to launch and 5.6% memory usage to six bounces and 3% memory usage. It now is a fast and lean as Acrobat 5.

PS: this might be useful in other applications, for example I do it in Spell Catcher to disable unneeded dictionaries.

[robg adds: I haven't upgraded to Reader 6 yet, so I haven't verified these claims.]
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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed | 14 comments | Create New Account
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Works great
Authored by: sinjin on Jul 16, '03 11:20:06AM
Thanks! Because of how slow things became, I was regretting upgrading from 5 despite the improvements in mouse scrolling etc that 6 brought.

By turing off those plugins I don't need, Reader 6 now launches in 2-3 bounces, as opposed to over 20 (PB G4 667)! Less than 3 seconds!

BTW you can also "show package contents" on the Reader app itself and drag the unwanted plugins to a new folder (e.g. Plugins_Disabled) in the same directory. I found this pretty easy, and fast, considering the unbelievable number of plugins, and therefore checkboxes, you need to disable in the get info panel!

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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: stottm on Jul 16, '03 11:37:10AM

Wow, major difference! I'll be doing this on the Winblows boxen as well. Adobe 6 is a pig with all of the plugins that I'll never use!

Load time is considerably faster now. Thanks for the tip!

To clarify on how to disable the plugins, use Get Info on the Acrobat 6 icon and there's a plugins section where you can disable each plugin. You may wish to review what they are so click the Apple menu while Acrobat is open and click the About Adobe Plugins menu item. This tells you what each plugin does and it shows what plugins each may be dependent on.

This will hold one over till Panther ships with it's new Preview.app that can read PDF's much faster.



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: dansroka on Jul 16, '03 12:02:29PM

Thank you for this hint! What a time saver. And thanks for the explanation of how to disable the plug ins and how to find what they do.



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: bluehz on Jul 16, '03 12:31:37PM

Some of those plugins are genuinely useful. I must admit - I have Acro 6 but prefer Acro 5 because Acro 6 Reader is so dog slow. So I tried this hint - going through the list and weeding out a few... some I have no idea what they are. Here's what I left enabled:

PictureTasks
AcroForm.acroplugin
Reflow.acroplugin
ImageViewer.acroplugin
SaveAsRTF.acroplugin
PDDom.acroplugin
Multimedia.acroplugin
Search.acroplugin
WebLink.acroplugin

Launched Acro 6 Reader, sure enough it launched a lot faster, then took a nose dive and crashed out - some error about AcroForms not loading properly.

Is there some sort of reference to what each of these plugins do so I might make a more educated decision on what to enable/disable?



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: MtnBiker on Jul 16, '03 02:20:57PM

Look under AdobeReader>About Adobe Plug-ins and it tells you what other plug-ins are needed to support that plug in. The Dependencies tells you what is required to work and what is required for full funtionality. A pain having to edit the Plug-ins in Get Info and then check what's needed in About…

Thanks for the hint.

---
Hermosa Beach, CA USA



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: bluehz on Jul 16, '03 05:40:58PM

Thx MtnBiker - I never even knew that was there. What an excellent resource - just what I was looking for. I managed to turn all these off:

MakeAccessible.acroplugin
PictureTasks
PrintMe.acroplugin
SendMail.acroplugin
SOAP.acroplugin
Updater.acroplugin

and got a nice little speed boost.



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: garyvand on Sep 04, '03 04:35:46PM

Any idea how to disable plug-ins on a Windows box?
I can't find the equivalent of Get Info.



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: wgscott on Jul 17, '03 08:42:17PM

I found I could run it with only these and retain all the functionality I need (I think):

PrintMe.acroplugin
Reflow.acroplugin
Search.acroplugin

If you manually drag the others into the PLug-ins Disabled directory, you can recover them. If you use the Get Info in the finder, it sticks them in the trash can.

It opens real fast now.



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: jyncroft on Jul 18, '03 02:27:43AM

I did not find that unchecking the plug-ins moved them to the trash... instead, I found that a Plug-ins Disabled folder was created and my unchecked plug-ins were found in there.

Are you sure you didn't click the Remove button instead of just unchecking the plug-in?

Jennifer



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: krishna on Aug 14, '03 01:45:10AM

You're dead-on. That's the difference.



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: Han Solo on Aug 06, '03 04:29:29PM
Anyone know how to disable that annoying Adobe ad on the RHS of the Acrobat Reader 6 menu bar?

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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: pete.boardman on Sep 03, '03 01:25:49PM

Try trashing:

/Applications/Adobe Reader 6.0.app/Contents/MacOS/Messages/ENU/RdrMsgENU.pdf

I'm testing this now...



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Disable plugins to improve Adobe Reader 6 launch speed
Authored by: krishna on Aug 14, '03 02:32:36AM

I searched for "Adobe Reader Applescript" (because I wanted to control/launch a full-screen adobe reader on one monitor while using applications on another one) in google, and came up with this link as number one ... something I'd been hunting for a couple days ago.

I'm wondering if this 'plug-ins' thing is built into 'Get Info', or if 'Get Info' is generally extensible enough that any application/file can add sections to it. In any case, I've disabled just about everything except search and the speed increase is very nice.

I did give up at one point, since I read pdfs so much on this nice TiBook screen, and now I just start Adobe Reader on login. At least my logins will be faster now :-)



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Some plug-ins depend on others
Authored by: Edmund on Sep 11, '04 06:17:17AM

If you want to enable only a few specific plug-ins then you should note that some plug-ins depend on others to work. For example, the WebLink plug-in only works if the EScript plug-in is enabled too.

You can easily find out what the dependencies are by going to the 'About Adobe Plug-Ins...' menu item inside Adobe Reader. Each plug-in has its dependencies listed in the 'Dependencies:' text box.



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