why the hell are there so many updates for Adobe Acrobat READER?!?

[DrPizza]

Every time I boot one of the computers in our faculty work room, I curse Adobe's name. All their updates for the entire suite, sticking things into here and there... It adds a good minute to the bootup before I can do anything functional. (It's also the reason why when I boot my computer, on Sept 1, I won't shut it down again until the end of June - I'll just hibernate it every night.)

 

[bruceb]

I agree, Adobe Reader has gotten way to big (file size) .. and there is no option to set a Default Directory to look for your .pdf files. They had that in V5 but they stopped it in V6 and later. Typical idiotic programmers.

 

[Jeff7]

I had to give up on foxit at work. For whatever reason it not fully compatible with PDFs that our scanner creates :\

Forward a problem PDF to Foxit and see if they want to dissect it. (This assumes that they have someone reading e-mails who actually gives a damn about doing his job. )

 

[ShawnD1]

How can adobe reader even have exploits? It makes absolutely no sense. The software shouldn't even have write capabilities.


Steve Jobs is right. Adobe is a piece of shit company and they intentionally make their shit horrible.

 

[lokiju]

Preview ftw (OS X viewer)

 

[dfuze]

Why so many updates? Probably because after all this time they still can't get it right

 

[lokiju]

How can adobe reader even have exploits? It makes absolutely no sense. The software shouldn't even have write capabilities.


Steve Jobs is right. Adobe is a piece of shit company and they intentionally make their shit horrible.

You know it's funny how I thought Steve Jobs was just being a blow hard a-hole when he made those statements yet since then I've had the joy of dealing with a number of issues with Adobe products that are enterprise class and are bloated, excessively expensive, unstable pieces of crap.

 

[shortylickens]

How can adobe reader even have exploits? It makes absolutely no sense. The software shouldn't even have write capabilities.


Steve Jobs is right. Adobe is a piece of shit company and they intentionally make their shit horrible.

Yeah it was ballsy to deliberately drop Flash support. But if that makes us get rid of it, or at least makes them improve it, then thats a good risk to take.

 

[Modelworks]

How can adobe reader even have exploits? It makes absolutely no sense. The software shouldn't even have write capabilities.

When you give applications the ability to launch other applications it opens a whole world of trouble.

Right now thousands of applications are exploitable because you can get them to load malware by just putting a malware file with a jpg file in the same directory. Windows is extremely dependent on everything sharing with everything else and praying applications behave.

http://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=9445

 

[dwell]

Preview ftw (OS X viewer)

This.

 

[shortylickens]

When you give applications the ability to launch other applications it opens a whole world of trouble.

Right now thousands of applications are exploitable because you can get them to load malware by just putting a malware file with a jpg file in the same directory. Windows is extremely dependent on everything sharing with everything else and praying applications behave.

http://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=9445

I miss DOS.

 

[ShawnD1]

When you give applications the ability to launch other applications it opens a whole world of trouble.

lol. I remember this. I was running a website for my little game server using Apache and one of the errors that would show up hundreds of times per day said people are trying to access apache/../../windows/system32/cmd.exe or something like that

 

[Eli]

I miss DOS.

I know right. Those were the days....

prompt $D$_$C$T$F$L$P$G FTW!

lol

 

[ShawnD1]

I know right. Those were the days....

prompt $D$_$C$T$F$L$P$G FTW!

lol

Dos was easy. It was a lot like using a Playstation 3 or Xbox 360. You have a simple interface that works great when doing basic tasks.

C:\> cd duke3d *hit tab*
C:\Duke3D> duke3d.exe

 

[lurk3r]

*cough* wanna have some fun, go to the mac store, open the web page jailbreakme.com yes it is that simple to jailbreak, a fairly obvious bug in the way pdf's are handled, your phone will lay back, open its legs and let anything install whatever it wants if the pdf is unrecognized. I did it on my ipod, after watching my buddy jailbreak his iphone 4

--edit-- checked it was fixed on the latest firmware patch, 4.0.1 and later.

 

[mmntech]

I took Adobe reader off both my computers when I realized how seriously bloated they were getting. Why does a document viewer need to use so much RAM when it's just a small text-only PDF? I use Foxit and Apple Preview now.

Yeah it was ballsy to deliberately drop Flash support. But if that makes us get rid of it, or at least makes them improve it, then thats a good risk to take.

Unfortunately it's the only device to do so, and alternatives are still in their infancy.

 

[IronWing]

Adobe has adopted the "advertise through updates" strategy that pissed off Real Player users to the point of making Real a pariah.

 

[Wingznut]

Thanks for the heads-up on foxit... I have a smile on my face as I uninstall Acrobat!

 

[imported_c0re]

every other MOTHERFUCKING DAY!!!! this bullshit has an update. Im fucking tired of it.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

It was too awesome and had to be crippled with bugs.

It was never awesome, from day one it's been slow and bloated. All the bugs are to punish people for not being smart enough to switch.

 

[shortylickens]

every other MOTHERFUCKING DAY!!!! this bullshit has an update. Im fucking tired of it.

Rofls!

You still mad a year later?

 

[dighn]

It was never awesome, from day one it's been slow and bloated. All the bugs are to punish people for not being smart enough to switch.

I don't get the hate. PDF is an awesome format and acrobat reader isn't bad except for its bloat. I installed foxit a while ago and it installed a piece of crap adware that refused to be uninstalled (yes yes I know if you read the install screens carefully you could avoid it, but it's still BS).

 

[Red Squirrel]

I wonder how many updates there has been since this thread was created.

Sadly looks like Firefox is following the same path as them. I have not checked in a while but I'm going to guess they are at what, 10?

 

[wischeez]

every other MOTHERFUCKING DAY!!!! this bullshit has an update. Im fucking tired of it.

Major lurker found...

 

[duragezic]

Yeah it's a pretty terrible piece of software. I don't use it at home and haven't for years (Foxit, obviously) but at work I do and yes in just a couple of months I've updated it several times.

I used to dislike PDFs because of it and it was never that fast to load them but now I love PDFs since Foxit is so fast and simple. For what 99% of people use PDFs for, seems like they should make a simple viewer and then another for publishing PDFs and such. Oh wait, they already do but they still screwed it up!