Reader would work for like 90% of people, but no, everyone needs Standard or Pro because reasons.
This reminds me of my all time favourite lost redditor that asked for a Adobe Acrobat alternative on r/freeuse (which is not about free software but very nsfw). They were extremely helpful though.
r/inflation never seemed to know if it was for Furries or for Economists
r/trees was absolutely sure what they were about. As was r/marijuanaenthusiasts.
There was apparently a significant population of German car mechanics on /r/BBW as well.
lost redditors was great fun, I remember that /r/Burial (about the musical artist) used to keep a running count of confused morticians that would wander in.
That’s hilarious.
The best pdf reader for me is Okular. It is free, open source and certified with the German “Blauer Engel” for it’s energy efficiency (as first software ever btw)
Okular is awesome
I’m loving Librera these days. Full version is free on F-Droid.
Blauer Engel
I don’t think it’s more “power efficient” than other pdf readers (Like Sumatra). It looks like the only reason it got that award is because it’s German software. I’m saying that as Austrian. Super weird thing to give an award to.
How would they even measure it? Pdf readers use close to zero CPU. And using more or less RAM has nothing to do with power usage.
Pdf readers use close to zero CPU
You say this but devs are making webpages that max out cpu usage when nothing is actually happening to render the webpage, it’s just rerendering stuff unnecessarily because hardware is cheap and no one is calling them on it.
Why would any software be different? It’s super easy to write shitty software, and there ought to be incentives to write it even better than “normal”, which is exactly what this award sounds like.
Show me a single website that “rerenders stuff” all the time to cause CPU spikes. That’s simply not how websites work at all. Websites can’t even max out your CPU usage with normal methods as JavaScript is single-threaded. The only way to max out the CPU in your browser is web workers, but they have nothing to do with website rendering.
Even Adobe Acrobat Reader, which counts as very resource intensive usually, goes to 0% CPU usage after you opened up a pdf and you just let it sit there.
Now you’re just being dumb and argumentative.
Doubling down eh? No, I will not reveal the company I work for here. Examples would include websites that use webgl and are poorly written. Or even just websites with less than optimal js. Everyone has had the experience of shitty JavaScript freezing their browser and you’re not an exception. Why pretend you’ve not seen that? Why would you be so adamantly wrong about something you clearly know zero about?
I have been a web developer for many years. Also, I’ve used computers more than 2 weeks.
You truly show your ignorance by claiming that software simply doesn’t use unnecessary resources. That is absolutely laughable.
If you’ve ever written a single line of code for money, I feel sorry for your clients.
Also I find it especially moronic that you think anything short of maxing cpu isn’t worthy of a glance. Developers used to build fully functional applications with 1 millionth the resources yet opened in seconds. According to you, it’s impossible to avoid things like Photoshop taking 10 seconds to load on very new hardware
Nobody asked about what company you work for, no clue where you got that from.
I can’t think of a single website I use on the daily that uses webgl, if it’s not a web game or something, most websites are relatively light weight and static once loaded. Hell, even Reddit (which is notorious for being slow) doesn’t use any resources after it’s done loading. There is no website that constantly re-renders stuff out there, except it’s a shitty niche project. Makes no sense at all, you load HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but you don’t re-render the DOM all the time except when things change.
CPU is the most important stat if we actually talk about energy savings. Using more RAM costs pretty much zero energy. GPU rarely used on the web (except we go back to 3D rendering or watching videos). If you use up actual wattage it’s mostly CPU related.
Yes, current applications are slow and bloated, but the original conversation was about pdf viewers. And even the most shitty pdf viewer I can think of uses no extra power after opening the pdf (pretty much zero CPU usage, just some RAM, which again is “free” in terms of power consumption). So if you compare pdf viewers I’d bet pretty much any of them could earn that reward if they applied for it.
I could have easily given an example of a web page that uses a ton of CPU while idle. But a contractor built it on may company’s website years ago and it’s not a priority to fix it. While I don’t know or care if it truly “maxed” the CPU, that wasn’t the point at all. The point was that it was a WEB PAGE, which a lot of people noticed that while sitting practically idle (a very simple animation playing) caused laptop fans to spin up like crazy.
But my slight exaggeration (using the word “max”) aside, the point was that any software can run inefficiently and that even small differences could add up to significant energy waste when deployed to millions of users.
I’m not sure why you’d make a claim that a PDF viewer could never be inefficient enough to matter. Of fucking course it could. Unless you have completed a study proving otherwise, you’re just talking out of your ass, and it’s a really weird hill to die on.
Mate, we are talking about international / widely used websites here. Of course you can build a shit website that eats up resources, I can do that in a single line of code. But the average website out there doesn’t burn up resources for no reason at all, most content is static and just sits there after being loaded.
Open up any PDF viewer you like, whatever you think is the heaviest or shittiest one (Probably Adobe). Load a big pdf file, now check the resource usage. It’s going to be absolutely nothing, any Electron app (like Discord) eats up way more RAM and CPU time.
Now get out with your straw man argument, you derailed this whole conversation by going from pdf readers to websites with this comment:
You say this but devs are making webpages that max out cpu usage when nothing is actually happening to render the webpage, it’s just rerendering stuff unnecessarily because hardware is cheap and no one is calling them on it.
Presumably it means it has been actually audited by a third party for wasteful cycles, etc. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s cheaper to run than another app, just that it’s cheaper than some objective standard.
I would bet a million that Adobe is very resource heavy in comparison to Okular. So while it is using almost nothing, everything adds up
The basic pdf editing options you can find in most browsers (including edge) is more than enough for most people
If you have a mac… well, preview is bloody amazing
Wait… I can edit in Preview?
“Hate” is a strong word for my feelings towards Adobe Acrobat reader. But I really don’t like it when I start it to view a pdf, you know the thing it is designed to do, and I have a weird popup, then a toolbar on the right with tools I can’t use cause they’re premium and a toolbar on the left and a toolbar at the top underneath the standard windows toolbar. I just wanna view the pdf man (also weird snapping when you scroll over a page). Haven’t found anything nice yet that just works. I don’t want to use Edge or a browser to view them and mupdf is too light weight. Would really like an evince for windows
@TheWaterGod
The only time I ever use acrobat is when I need to fill in the blanks of a PDF. Mainly because Preview.app on macOS does a terrible job of thatI actually used to use DC a lot in my previous job (everyone had access), and having full edit functionality would help me in this one too. I’ve tried other options but I haven’t requested a licence because the main thing I do nowadays is merge and split pdfs and there are other options for that. I only miss it occasionally.
