Acrobat Reader Being Developed for Solaris x86

If you have downloaded the latest Solaris x86 (2008.05), and tried to download the Acrobat Reader, then you are like me and haven't found a version for your newly installed OS. Adobe today announced that it is developing a version of Acrobat Reader for Solaris x86. But Adobe says that it'll be released only in 2009 and not this year.

The announcement reads:

This was, of course, not a straightforward decision - there are lots of dependencies that we need to deal with, including third-party dependencies, platform limitations, internal and external dependencies and resource constraints. These constraints are not always apparent but have to be dealt with when a huge product like the Reader needs to be ported to a new platform.

The announcement has two sad things for me. It is going to take too long to release and why hasn't Adobe already started working on it. PDF is like the standard for document sharing and it is widely used. Solaris is also a big platform, although the x86 move is a pretty new one. Adobe already has a version of Acrobat Reader for the Solaris SPARC platform. So it seems odd that making the dependencies is going to take so much time!!