I came across this thread but from a slightly different background which, of course, is not fixable by Apple considering where I am: the issues mentioned here are just part of those plaguing the Apple's build-in PDF viewer at lease since Lion that I run in concert with other 2 newer OS'es X. I never used Snow Leopard so can't say anything about reading PDFs there. In Lion Preview is v.5 and for the most part it's very robust and stable.Why for the most part and what's wrong? Well, scrolling, zooming, swiping works really fast and smooth until annotations in the form of graphic objects (ovals, ellipses, rectangles etc) are added. As you add them then the smooth order of things falls apart and Preview gets wonky at responding to Trackpad gestures. Any methods to cure the issue have no effect. I suspect that's related to how the autosave feature was implemented in Lion but that's just my wild guess.
In Mavericks Preview 7 got a boost in performance and is considerably faster regardless of how many annotations of any kind you add. However the annotations themselves have gone down in terms of usability. In Mavericks the maximum height of the note box is constrained which is absurd and in complete discord from the philosophy "just works" - it's not. If not enough, the Inspector is butchered in Preview 7: when you click any annotation in the annotations section of the Inspector the bounds of the floating Inspector window get enormously stretched horizontally, going out of those of the visible area of the screen - this is most stupid and silly bug I have even encountered. In Lion you could pick any color for the note, in Mavericks you're given a very scant choice from only 5 colors.
As of High Sierra the situation has gotten worse and here're brief observations of bugs and disturbing inconsistency: 1. Choosing the red color or any of its tints for the note makes its background neutral (decolorized). 2. Searching keywords no longer automatically reveals search results as it used to in Lion and Mavericks. To run them over you have to pre-select the view to which the sidebar will be opened and open it. What's this? This is a bad software design. 3. The Inspector is just a shadow of the former self and got stuck in the mud: they fixed the over-sized window problem but created a new one: now when you click on any annotation in the notes section those won't show up in the viewer/editor box at the bottom of the Inspector. Nice.
And so on, and so forth. They want us to upgrade to the newest OS as soon as it's rolled out and forget previous more stable and seamless experience? No thanks, I don't want to risk and keep abreast of developments that much.
