Is it time to leave insecure Adobe behind?

There are plenty of good alternatives nowadays. evince immediately comes to mind. No need for proprietary Adobe nonsense.

Geeze, I open *everything* at work, PDFs, XLS, DOC, you name it. I use Acrobat. On Windows XP.

I kind of want to find out what it feels like to be party to one of these big, corporate intranet meltdowns. I missed the "SQL Slammer" one in 2003 - got laid off the day before it hit, didn't get on at a new company until April - Giant Immoral Corp. had it pretty well in hand by April.

I've never really been part of a security fiasco, and I want the experience.

As someone who gets paid to clean up after a fiasco and recommend (and sometimes even implement) meaningful security I can tell you one thing: you don't want to have that experience, ever. I realize you are almost certainly being sarcastic but having lived through the real thing it just plain isn't worth even joking about.

You don't want the experience. If the company can find a way to make you the scapegoat, they will.

I actually just recently started using Adobe Reader (the Linux version). I'd been having trouble with the size of the printouts in Xpdf ... guess it's time to switch back.

@gus3: Yep. I think I've told this story before, but... I did a five month contract cleaning up mess after a number of offices were consolidated down to one. Security was a nightmare. They had incidents and had basically fired all the sys admins who were, of course, supposed to be to blame. Sure enough those admins had warned the company of the problems and had made very good recommendations which were roundly ignored or, more often, deliberately prohibited by management. They were fired anyway.

I don't use Adobe Reader on any OS that I use.

TA, what do you use on Windows?

> ...what do you use on Windows?

Foxit Reader, while far from perfect, seems to be much better than Adobe.

Buncha wimps.

I read PDF's raw and decode them in my head.

> Buncha wimps.

Absolutely. What's it to you? :)

I second Foxit on Windows, fast as lightning compared to Adobe, and it doesn't want to take over the machine.

No I don't use Foxit. It's requires a rent payment. I use a FOSS tool, I'll give you the name as soon as I get to work.

I use Sumatra PDF which is distributed under GPLv2 license.

> It's requires a rent payment.

I don't remember that being the case, and a quick perusal of the EULA doesn't seem to show it. Am I missing something?

I looked at Sumatra, but it didn't seem ready for prime time when I did. Perhaps I should take another look.

I've never installed Adobe Acrobat on any of my Linux boxes. Xpdf, kpdf, and evince have always sufficed.

@jd, I've never used Foxit, I do know it's proprietary. My boss uses it and I was under the impression he'd paid rent on it. I could be wrong.

I use whatever comes to hand on my Linux systems usuall Xpdf or kpdf or evince. I don't install Adobe. I've found Sumatra to be quite useful, on Windows.

> ...and I was under the impression he'd paid rent on it.

He probably did. They offer a paid version with more features than the free version, but as far as I know the free one is fully free, even for corporate use. There's always the possibility that I'm wrong, of course. It's been known to happen on occasion, unlike Dino. :)

Actually JD it's not Free, it's merely no rent.

jdixon -

Just to correct you, I am not infallible. I could, one day, be wrong about something. Even if I die before that happens, it will not mean that the possibility didn't exist, just that it never materialized.

> Actually JD it's not Free, it's merely no rent.

I used local case free deliberately TA. I normally use Free if I mean free in the GNU sense. Foxit Reader is free as in freeware, not free as in Free software. It's good freeware though, so if you're stuck on Windows it's worth looking at.