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Adobe Reader X With Sandbox Due In November
Trailrunner7 writes "Adobe will finally release the new version of its Reader software — which will include the much-anticipated Protected Mode security feature — next month. Adobe Reader X will include a number of other new features in addition to the sandbox feature. Adobe officials have been discussing Protected Mode for several months now and said early on that it would be included in the next version of Reader, but had never set a time line for the release of Reader X. Now, the company says the new version will be available in November, although no specific date was announced."
Having worked on Adobe Acrobat (and Reader) for the last 8 or so years (my name is in a good chunk of all the release credits since version 5 or 6) the feature to add form support was added in version 3 (which came out in the mid 90's) as an addon.
It was added for the same reason a lot of features were added - to extend the product compete in a specific marketplace - specifically places where forms are displayed. Same reason a lot of features in a lot of products are added - to make more money in another market.
Where I work now they use a development kit from Datatel called Colleague - most of what it does is display forms from a pick database and read or save these fields (it has scheduling, accounting/ap/ar etc as well built in). You could in fact use Acrobat to display these same forms. And if your migrating from a paper based workflow - you can in fact scan all these forms in, add a bunch of fields with whatever logic JS provides (and in turn hook that into whatever logic livecycle server provides) and you have an electronic version of the paper form you used to file away.
That was in fact (as I recall it was a while back) the marketing pitch.
It does work too - there's even support for SAP. At one point the IRS had grand visions of filing all your taxes electronically with it (but since we can't have nice things in this country that got canned) - so it does have a lot of potential. Since something like 90% of all PC's have some version of Reader - it's an excellent target platform if you want to display paper like forms on the net.
But like ANYTHING that has any kind of outside connectivity it's vulnerable to attack. People on here always herald other technologies as they would save us from whatever we use now, but its just a matter of what is and isn't the target. Acrobat 4 and 5 had massive vulnerabilities, but no-one ever complained about rogue pdf files because it wasn't a target. I remember the first big vulnerability on Acrobat 7 - it wasn't sanitizing inputs (it does now!) and allowed a PDF to execute commands on the PC (very similar to the bobby tables comic). After that exploit - the blood was in the water and everyone and their sister wanted to poke away at the code to find new ones (and being a very old product it has plenty of them...).
So why is it that Acrobat reader is 200mb and takes forever to install, and installs several other adobe products with it and then requires admin rights to install updates so it always gets outdated and becomes vulnerable?... it's because it has become bloatware. Just like Quickbooks, it just keeps getting slower and slower and slower, and contains more features that 90% of users wont ever use.
SumatraPDF is like 1.5MB and installs in less than 5 seconds and opens instantly
Perhaps there should be a Lite version of Adobe Acrobat for people who just want to view PDF files... we could call it "Adobe Acrobat Reader"