Adobe May Change To Monthly Patch Cycle

Trailrunner7 writes "Adobe, which has been under fire for the security of its flagship products, Flash and Reader, for some time now, may be on the verge of changing its patching process to push fixes out on a monthly schedule, which would coincide with Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday releases. The change would be the second major adjustment to Adobe's patching process in the last year or so. In 2009 the company moved to a scheduled quarterly patch release process in an effort to give its customers a better chance to plan for testing and deployment. That change was generally well-received. Now Adobe may change the schedule again in order to get patches out more quickly. The company is considering releasing its security fixes for Reader on a monthly schedule, the same day that Microsoft releases its patches."

Comments

STUPID ACROREAD ICON

[Silly Man]

But will they stop placing that stupid icon on our desktop during every single update?!

Great!

[leonardofelin]

Now I won't know whose patch messed up my computer after the update...

Re:Great!

[NevarMore]

Thats the idea, its called "the blame game" and it cuts down on support costs.

Will we still have to REBOOT?

[AriesGeek]

Seriously, Adobe, why do I have to reboot after updating your damn user-land software? I can even install some OS patches without rebooting!

Re:Will we still have to REBOOT?

[PalmKiller]

You don't, just tell it not to reboot, and the new version will work fine until you decide to do the reboot

Avoid acrobat reader at all costs

[Idiomatick]

You know you suck when your company is playing catchup with Microsoft on security and patching.

Re:Avoid acrobat reader at all costs

[PsychoSlashDot]

You know you suck when your company is playing catchup with Microsoft on security and patching.

Seriously. I don't like to swear much on Slashdot, but I'd like to tell Adobe "fuck you!"

This isn't about an operating system. It isn't even about a productivity suite like Office. It's a reader. Stop patching every damned month and secure the bastard. Right now. One patch and you're done. I do not condone any corporate plan to regularly trickle out tiny fixes here and there when they're discovered because that's Good Enough. It's not good enough.

Adobe needs to change their product plan.

Adobe Reader - views PDFs and that's it
Adobe Reader Pro - views PDFs, has all the scripting and form-filling features that are vulnerable and buggy
Adobe Acrobat - makes PDFs

Strip Reader down to as few features as possible. We know that 99% of what Reader is used for is flat basic text reading. So either make a product that does that and only that, or at least make a MODE where turning on all the other features for X minutes requires a UAC-style prompt.