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F-Secure Suggests Ditching Adobe Reader For Free PDF Viewers

Posted by timothy on from the jane-the-sex-was-good-but-I've-had-enough-circus dept.

hweimer writes "Yesterday at RSA security conference, F-Secure's chief research officer recommended dropping Adobe Reader for viewing PDF files because of the huge amount of targeted attacks against it. Instead, he pointed to PDFreaders.org, a website maintaining a list of free and open source PDF viewers."

5 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not Much Cross-Platform by John+Whitley · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes. There's also Skim for OS X, which is far and away my favorite PDF reader for any platform. It's actually designed by and for people who really want to read, quickly search, and annotate PDFs.

    Here are two of Skim's great features that I'd love to to see in other PDF readers:

    1. Fast search with great presentation. Skim's PDF text search is blazing fast, provides a concise one-hit per line view, as well as thumbnails of the page around the search target on mouse hover. The thumbs are great for quickly winnowing down to the correct hit; you often don't need to even read the text, just the "look" is enough to know you've got the right thing.
    2. The ability to easily spin off small windows frozen to a part of a page -- great for popping open a diagram or other material referenced across multiple pages of a text.

    I do believe that Skim relies heavily on various OS X frameworks (e.g. for PDF rendering, Spotlight support for search, etc.). That definitely goes to show the value of providing functionality via general, well-conceived and well-implemented frameworks instead of being wrapped up inside of monolithic applications.

  2. Adobe: The Worlds Worst Software Company by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That was my response to the dreamweaver CS3 install that dumped over 800 meg of bolt-on garbarge and two new services BEFORE starting the actual dreamweaver install.

    And the new-and-improved dreamweaver was almost exactly the same as the macromedia version. They added a new CSS selector and a new tab for their adobe ajax framework. And they broke the best interakt extension. So the product went backwards, despite trending towards epic MS levels of application footprint.

    They acquired the interackt folks and I think CS4 suckers are still waiting for the supported port.

    Everything adobe touches turns to shit if you ask me.

  3. What about DRM PDFs? by Orion+Blastar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have a ton of DRM protected eBooks from my college. They only work in Adobe Acrobat Reader. How do I remove the DRM, or would removing the DRM so that I can use them in a third party PDF viewer be a violation of my license with the college and publishers?

    I really don't want to lose my eBook library, but I don't want to get infected either.

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  4. Re:Already there by toleraen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Exactly what I don't get of this. When tracking the adobe exploits I saw several for Foxit pop up. The guy is basically advising security through obscurity. Foxit definitely released patches quicker than Adobe, but the vulnerabilities were still there...

  5. I'm waiting for the... by mysidia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Adobe suggests ditching F-Secure for other anti-malware products.

    But that won't happen and people aren't going to switch PDF readers, until the security software itself starts identifying Acrobat installations as riskware and displaying dialog boxes alerting users to the security risk and what actions they need to take (what types of alternatives are available to use)..