Why does the downloader include Foxit? I know I'm not the only one who doesn't appreciate that...

Because the game manuals are in PDF format and Foxit is "free beer" and pretty lightweight for a PDF reader. It's not malicious. If you really prefer Adobe's stuff use it instead and uninstall Foxit (or just leave it there, it's not like it's 10 MB install size is going to run you out of disk space).

I think the issue is why they include it at all. I have over 100 games from GOG and each and every one of those installers has a PDF reader for the manuals. That's a fair amount of space to be taken up by installers for a PDF reader.

Plus, it's not like PDF is some obscure file format, chances are that people already have it. If they don't, it should be something that is net installed.

I'm assuming that you mean the installers include Foxit, not the downloader (which simply downloads installers).

I didn't know about this. When did it start? I don't want extra software in the installers. I'm perfectly capable of choosing my own PDF reader (and downloading it once instead of over and over).

They've been doing this for years, and sometimes it's not Foxit, I remember installing Shogo and it asked if I wanted to install Adobe Reader.

You don't have to install it if you don't want to. It's just there if you need it.

This is as bad as complaining about installers that come with optional directX or VC++ runtime installers.

Acrobat is bloatware compared to Foxit.

If you think about it, it would seem silly that GOG wouldn't include the minumum (and still optional) suite required to use everything that comes with a purchase.

No, I'm sorry. Foxit is garbage.

I used it for a while (sue me, I like the name) and I kept having errors when downloading PDFs or even trying to read them. My browsers crashed often, too.

I removed Foxit, reinstalled Adobe, and the problems went away. Thank $deity it's not installed by default...

I had PDF reader crashes and a friend of mine who's nearly done with a Bachalors in Computer Engineering suggested I use Foxit. It pissed me off 20 times out 10 and kept breaking. I went back to Adobe and the issues I had with that went away.

While it's fairly inconsequential to just uncheck the Foxit box, I can understand the irritation... as a Linux user, I'm forced to install an unneeded copy of DOSBox with almost ever game I've bought, and then go and delete the aforementioned DOSBox after installation.

I don't want to derail this thread, though it's not particularly railed. However I don't think people particularly recommend Foxit because it's a superior product, more because it's not as popular an attack vector for viruses.

Compatibility with X,Y,Z may be better or worse, I don't know, though I expect the manuals that GOG ship will open successfully in it. Probably because they read them in it first.

Stick with Adobe Reader... in the new versions, Enhanced Security is enabled by default, and, you can always disable JavaScript for additional security (although this will cause problems with PDFs that pull content from the web).

The problem with this is, if you choose not to install it, you have to uncheck it every time you run an installer. Some older installers use Adobe instead, which means you're probably going to be unchecking boxes no matter what, or just installing it just to not have to deal with unchecking them anymore. They add to the file size, and that can add up.

I dislike that DOSBox games require you to install DOSBox. In Linux, I have no need for it to install it's own DOSBox for every game, and if I try to uncheck it, it will complain that it can't find DOSBox unless I have it installed through Wine. The syntax for the dosbox configurations is often Windows-centric, using backslashes, inconsistent casing, unusual order of commands, and other such things that I'll manually resolve when I install a DOSBox title in Linux.

On the bright side, I never have to worry about GOG games having the latest DOSBox version. ;)

I personally prefer Sumatra PDF, but Adobe has really cleaned up Acrobat in recent years.

That being said, whomever it was that decided to include the scripting functionality into a document format ought to be beaten severely with a bag of old AOL disks. The problem is that few people need it and yet it's in every single set up you download from GOG. And that does add up over time. I'm sure for most people it isn't a large amount, but for me it's probably a few hundred megabytes of download and storage that I don't need.

Honestly, I don't really care that much, but it's not something that serves any particular purpose for most customers.