Do you see all that stuff flashing by when say, Photoshop starts up? Those are plugins. I'm not exactly sure what they can do other than remove the features outright.

Anyways, it starts up in roughly 6 or 7 seconds on my spinning rust drive. I can't find this something to get worked up about, especially given the feature set of Adobe products.

Why do the plugins need to load first?

Does the file you're opening use them? Why can't it load faster so if I've made a mistake opening the program I can close it before it does all that plugin loading?

Splash screens are just a lazy way of saying the user's time isn't valuable.

Photoshop plugins don't work that way for the most part. There's no way to tell from a given file "uses" a plugin or not - usually a plugin is a specialized image manipulation method.

>Splash screens are just a lazy way of saying the user's time isn't valuable.

Wow. Hyperbole much? I'd rather get all my loading done up front instead of waiting per file or per action anyways. Secondly, it's 8 seconds or so per app start. Less if you have an SSD or a non-recommended-reqs system. Perspective.

Also consider these are pro-tier applications. The target market isn't going to be exiting their apps again and again, rather launch once and stay inside them.

I dunno about Photoshop - I never use it - but in Illustrator, a lot of core program functionality is implemented as plugins nowadays. For CS5.1, plug-ins/extensions has 53 items, plug-ins/tools has 53.

I guess they could do some kind of lazy loading, but that'd be, you know, work to implement, and they're too busy with stuff like their own (broken) custom window routines to get Windowsesque MDI on the Mac.

The Adobe Reader plugin also loaded tons of default plugins (including JavaScript and 3D support) when opening any PDF. That's (one of the reasons) why it was so slow.

Yea, I remember Kas Thomas talking about that. What is interesting is that he works at Adobe as a Technology Evangelist.