Adobe Reader X Released, With Emphasis On Security

Adobe Reader isn’t a Microsoft product, but I’ll bet that on Windows computers it’s almost as common as Notepad or Calculator. That’s why it’s important for you to know that Adobe released Reader X (ten, just like with Apple) yesterday for Windows XP, Vista, 7, OS X, and Linux.

The state of Windows security today is almost unbelievably improved from five years ago. Windows Update and Microsoft Update provide convenient, mostly-transparent delivery of patches and fixes, Microsoft offers its own competitive anti-virus solution in the form of Microsoft Security Essentials, and Windows Vista and Windows 7 brought many much-needed under-the-hood security improvements. It’s not perfect, but Windows security is nowhere near the laughingstock it was in those pre-XP SP2 days.
Security analysts quickly found a new punching bag, however: Adobe Reader is as ubiquitous as IE6 was at its height, installed on an estimated 90% of computers worldwide. PDF files are popular and easy to distribute, and to date Windows has never come with a built-in program capable of opening them. Hence, the widespread presence of Adobe Reader on computers throughout homes and businesses, a situation that caused one security specialist to dub it “the new Internet Explorer” earlier this year.
Adobe has made some steps forward in the last year, issuing a much-improved update for Acrobat 8 and 9 series products and committing to a quarterly update schedule, but one still gets the feeling that they’re behind – they’ve released several updates this year that were either out-of-band or published ahead of schedule, all because of security issues.
All of these security-related issues have led Adobe to release the Acrobat X family of products with an emphasis on greater security. Chief among the new product’s feature list is sandboxing technology that helps to separate the PDF from the OS. While not foolproof, sandboxing can help prevent bad PDFs from damaging the OS. Google and Microsoft have built similar technology into the Chrome browser and the Office 2010 suite, respectively. It’s worth noting that the sandboxing is limited to the Windows version of the software right now – Mac and Linux users don’t have it, at least not yet.
It’s safe to say that all current Adobe Reader users should upgrade to the new version, especially if you’re using version 8 or earlier. Reader X is quite a bit snappier than Reader 9, especially when loading PDFs in a browser window, and the above-mentioned security updates also make it an easy recommendation.
As for all the people who have already jumped to an alternative product like Foxit Reader – just move along. Nothing to see here.