Adobe Acrobat Reader doesn’t provide an uninstall utility on Mac OS X (despite claiming to do so on their support site) and after installing it for a single test, I wanted it gone. Following are the steps I took to remove Adobe Acrobat Reader from my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.7).

Note that these instructions will likely remove all Adobe software, including AIR if you have that installed; AIR is installed automatically (and without telling you) with Acrobat Reader.

Delete these folders from Finder:

• /Applications/Adobe Acrobat
• /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Utilities

In Terminal, type sudo find / -name *Adobe*
From that list, delete these:

• /Library/Application Support/Adobe
• /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Application Support/Adobe
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Caches/Adobe
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Logs/Adobe
• /Users/Shared/Library/Application Support/Adobe

In Terminal, type sudo find / -name *Acrobat*
From that list, delete:

• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Caches/Acrobat

Reboot. I don’t like having to, but several of the Adobe components were locked or in use and I couldn’t completely delete them. After rebooting, a sample PDF linked from a Web site opened in Safari via Preview, and a downloaded PDF opened in Preview standalone just like they used to.

Right now it looks like I got everything, but I’ll update this post if I find any more remnants.