2012-10-12

Uninstall Adobe Reader X (10) on Mac OS X

I loathe Adobe Reader on OS X. Preview is so sleek and fast. Adobe Reader on Windows 7 is fine, however. It fits right in with all the other clutter.

The online method of paying corporate taxes in my county requires the use of the Adobe Reader plugin for Safari. Yuck! So I install and uninstall the whole mess every year. This post is to document what I did this time.
  1. Turn off MozyHome (offsite backup) and Time Machine (site backup). These will slow down my find below if they happen to fire off in the middle of running that command.
  2. Throw Adobe Reader into Trash.
  3. From Terminal run this: sudo find / -name '*[Aa][Dd][Oo][Bb][Ee]*'
  4. Manually pick through that list of files and throw them in Trash, too. But be careful! Some applications have Adobe libraries that I don't want trashed. Also, I certainly don't want to accidentally delete sadobeauties768.jpg. See list of files that I actually removed below.
  5. Turn Time Machine and Mozy Home back on.
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin
/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.acrobat.pdfviewer.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.acrobat.pdfviewer.plist.lockfile
/Users/mylogin/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat
/Users/mylogin/Library/Logs/Adobe
/Users/mylogin/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Reader.plist
/Users/mylogin/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Reader.plist.lockfile

Keep in mind, I am still grudgingly forced to keep the Adobe Flash plugin installed for Safari. This means I can't blindly delete everything named "Adobe".

I'm currently running OS X 10.7.5 and the version of Adobe Reader I uninstalled was 10.1.4.

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