Do I need to keep old versions of Bridge?

Question

I've bought different versions of Creative Suite apps over time and now have an unnumbered version of Bridge, Bridge CS3, Bridge CS5 and Bridge CS5.5 on my computer. I have InDesign CS3 and CS5, Illustrator CS3 and Photoshop CS5.1 on my iMac running OS 10.7.5. Do I need to keep earlier versions to interact with CS3 versions of Illustrator? And how about Adobe Device Central?

Answer 1

My question is whether I can get rid of the lower-numbered versions of Bridge, Device Central and Extension Manager and, if so, what is the safe and sensible way to do it.
The answer is more or less the same, If you don't have much space problems and you may find the need to use some of the old applications just leave them where they are. If you want to tidy up just place the rarely used app in one main folder (e.g. Adobe - old) there is no need to uninstall nor is it wise to partially uninstall.
You maybe don't own a Creative Suite in total but all applications with CSxx are part of the suite its version number shows.
You can't use the uninstaller for Bridge alone per CS5, this has Bridge bundled with either PS or AI or ID. So you have to uninstall them to. removing applications to the trash manually is usually not the best thing to try. If you needed to install it instead of copy to your App folder you also have to official uninstall it for best practice.
You can use only one version at the time of Bridge while you can have multiple versions of other applications of the CS series running and active at the same time.
Ideally Bridge is the 'bridge' between those apps but due to many differences between the separate CS versions Bridge (and other apps) are not very good in working together.
Namely the start up scripts won't load or function in Bridge CS5 when the other apps don't have this same CS number. (as said, CS5 and CS5.5 might be possible) so communication with tools menu or MiniBridge will not be smooth-less or not possible at all.
You can however always use the newest Bridge as main application and choose open with and select the wanted application that shows in the list.
Don't know if this is the same for the place command because I only have CS6 on my machine and I can't check myself.
And the biggest space consumer is in your user library / caches/ Adobe / Bridge CSxx. inhere is a folder called Cache and this can grow to huge proportions if you use it a lot.
If you rarely use the older versions just keep the latest version as it is and dump the other ones.
The same as for Bridge is for the extension manager. You may need the latest version. if the others are cluttering your sight put them in the Adobe -old folder.