Ars Technica lists down the worst offenders for enshittification. What caught my eye was the inclusion of PDF.
But Acrobat was ultimately an Adobe product, with all that came with it. It was expensive, it was prone to bloat and poor performance, and there was no end to its security issues. Features were added that greatly expanded its scope but were largely useless for most people. Eventually, you couldn’t install it without also installing what felt like half a dozen seemingly unrelated Adobe products.
By building PDF capabilities into its OS, Apple allowed me to go Adobe-free and avoid some of this enshittification on my computers.
After reading the article, I realized the author was right. When I first used PDFs, I remembered how painfully slow Acrobat Reader was. Searching for alternatives, I found Foxit, which was blazing fast. I haven’t used Foxit in a long time, so I am not sure if it has also slowed down like Acrobat Reader.
When I switched from Windows to Mac, Preview became my go-to app for viewing PDFs. Over the years, I never once used Acrobat Reader’s features like commenting, signing, or annotating—not even once.
While the term enshittification was coined in 2022, it existed all along.