Introduction

A few month’s back the Adobe Acrobat Reader landed itself in doo-doo with some Javascript security worries.  Adobe were slow off the mark informing their customers (like me) what to do.  So it was the blogs that provided the answer:

Turn off Javascript

Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough.  After a week a huge patch was issued.

Solution by Realisation

At this time I’d become increasingly frustrated with the program.  All it had to do was read pdf files, (an invention of Adobe), which since 1997 when I got my first PC, it’s managed to do, getting slower and slower at it as the different versions came out and yet mysteriously, processor speeds have increased dramatically.

My first processor was a 100MHz K5.  Now it’s a (now obsolete) Athlon64, 3700+ using the single, but extremely fast,  San Diego core.

Similarly with the annoying unwarranted updates control it insists on installing into it’s vast bulk.  Vast? Yes vast.  Last time I looked the bugger was taking up 221Mb on my hard drive just to read the odd PDF!

So that’s when I not only turned off Javascript.  I turned off the Adobe Reader!!!

I’ve never looked back.  I tried the Foxit Reader.  It installs in a jiffy, loads almost instantaneously and does everything that a PDF file reader should do – that is, it reads PDF files!    (I wanted to say ‘period’ there but I put an exclamation mark for effect – geddit!)

So that’s what I advise everyone to do.  Ditch the montrosity and try something else.  Get back to fast computing.  I’m going to give some of the Open Source readers a go next from this list here: http://pdfreaders.org/

Informative Links on the Adobe Duffness

• Update on Adobe Reader Issue – Adobe’s own words
• Exploitable Code Example
• Adobe: Turn Off JavaScript In PDF Reader – ProNetworks news
  
• Adobe: Turn off JavaScript in PDF Reader – ZDNet
• Adobe: switch off Javascript in PDF Reader – PCPro

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