Order of the Bath

Adobe started to lose it some years ago when some marketing wizard decided to re-brand Acrobat Reader and call it Adobe Reader. You still find even experienced system managers confusing the names and you are never quite sure if they are talking about the real Adobe Acrobat or just the Reader freebie.

So when they announced Adobe 9 I wasn’t sure at first if they meant the full product or just the Reader (or both). Especially as we have only just had the emergency patch for Reader 8.1.2. “What patch?” do I hear you ask. Well, to digress, it was very important because it fixed a security hole that could allow those safe files called PDFs to compromise your system. Open up Reader now and click on Help > Check for Updates and it should download a thing called “Security Update 1”. Not that you would realise when it is done because for some stupid reason, the version number is not changed so it still says Version 8.1.2. While we are on the subject, if you download the Windows patch by hand it is called AcrobatReaderUpd812SU1_all.msi so it seems even Adobe are confused by the name.

Now the rest of this is hearsay as I haven’t tried it myself yet but it seems that the new Adobe 9 has bundled together the PDF Reader which we generally tolerated with Flash, the product that Adobe bought from Macromedia and which we all love to hate. It also includes Acrobat.com and Adobe Air, neither of which I have heard of. That is a 33MB download and 200MB+ install for something to just read PDF files! Also beware of the Free eBay desktop which is automatically ticked for you.

I won’t be bothering on my Mac—Preview does the job for me just fine and my Windows systems can stick with Version 8.

This entry was posted on 7 Jul 2008 at 11:16 by Rick and is filed under Security, Technical, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.