It is very anoying because FIRST; Nobody needs a desktop short cut to adobe reader. SECOND; Desktop icons slow the start up of your pc THIRD; You have to be an administrator to delete the stupid thing.

SEND ADOBE FEEDBACK:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

I guess the reason to keep one in the start menu might be if you have a badly-created pdf that won’t run in Foxit and you need to start Acrobat Reader and use file>open (for people not comfortable with right click> open with…)
Unfortunately after about version 5 or 6, Acrobat reader just kept on getting more bloated. I am told that 9 is lighter than 8, but I haven’t checked.
I also find it hard to understand why I have to download a downloader to run an installer to install the installation. It just seems horribly layered for no reason. What happened to downloading an installation file, keeping it handy on a fileserver or USB stick and just installing by double clicking whenever required, even offline?

An extra +1 for Foxit is that you can install from an MSI, which is great for proper corporate deployments using Group Policy for example, or scripting it.
(obviously if you are cloning whole machines then that’s a different matter, but even then having an MSI installer makes it less painful to remove and reinstall for upgrades)

A -1 for some eLearning products (and I am looking at Microsoft here from a recent experience with some courseware) which check for the presence of Acrobat specifically before letting you unpack the files you need. Very bad form. Checking for a valid file association and path to whatever reader you have installed ought to be the way to go here (or just warn the user but let them override and go ahead anyway).