Everyone is punished for Windows' Adobe Reader. I never got it either. PDF is not a web format. I would not want to read doc files in my browser either. Evince(-light) starts up in milliseconds.
> I would not want to read doc files in my browser either.
This doesn't make sense to me. Why should the viewer care about the implementation details of a document? If I click on a link to a document, I want to see the result in the browser, and I think that that's the correct default. Only if I'm clicking on something which produces something that isn't intended to be a document (an archive, for example) does opening another program make sense as the default.
