F-Secure Suggests Ditching Adobe Reader For Free PDF Viewers

hweimer writes "Yesterday at RSA security conference, F-Secure's chief research officer recommended dropping Adobe Reader for viewing PDF files because of the huge amount of targeted attacks against it. Instead, he pointed to PDFreaders.org, a website maintaining a list of free and open source PDF viewers."

Re:Not Much Cross-Platform

[John Whitley]

Yes. There's also Skim [sourceforge.net] for OS X, which is far and away my favorite PDF reader for any platform. It's actually designed by and for people who really want to read, quickly search, and annotate PDFs.

Here are two of Skim's great features that I'd love to to see in other PDF readers:

1. Fast search with great presentation. Skim's PDF text search is blazing fast, provides a concise one-hit per line view, as well as thumbnails of the page around the search target on mouse hover. The thumbs are great for quickly winnowing down to the correct hit; you often don't need to even read the text, just the "look" is enough to know you've got the right thing.
2. The ability to easily spin off small windows frozen to a part of a page -- great for popping open a diagram or other material referenced across multiple pages of a text.

I do believe that Skim relies heavily on various OS X frameworks (e.g. for PDF rendering, Spotlight support for search, etc.). That definitely goes to show the value of providing functionality via general, well-conceived and well-implemented frameworks instead of being wrapped up inside of monolithic applications.

Adobe: The Worlds Worst Software Company

[Anonymous Coward]

That was my response to the dreamweaver CS3 install that dumped over 800 meg of bolt-on garbarge and two new services BEFORE starting the actual dreamweaver install.

And the new-and-improved dreamweaver was almost exactly the same as the macromedia version. They added a new CSS selector and a new tab for their adobe ajax framework. And they broke the best interakt extension. So the product went backwards, despite trending towards epic MS levels of application footprint.

They acquired the interackt folks and I think CS4 suckers are still waiting for the supported port.

Everything adobe touches turns to shit if you ask me.

What about DRM PDFs?

[Orion Blastar]

I have a ton of DRM protected eBooks from my college. They only work in Adobe Acrobat Reader. How do I remove the DRM, or would removing the DRM so that I can use them in a third party PDF viewer be a violation of my license with the college and publishers?

I really don't want to lose my eBook library, but I don't want to get infected either.

Re:Already there

[Sentry21]

Funny I know, but it's not far off â" Acrobat only bugs me about updating when I'm about to try doing something else. 'I know you said you wanted to see this PDF, but wouldn't you be happier waiting 10 minutes for a software update instead?'

Acrobat needs some method of downloading updates in the background and then just asking you if you want to apply them (yes/no) when you start it, but applying them later, when you're done.

Then again, most apps need to do things like that.

Re:Already there

[toleraen]

Exactly what I don't get of this. When tracking the adobe exploits I saw several for Foxit pop up. The guy is basically advising security through obscurity. Foxit definitely released patches quicker than Adobe, but the vulnerabilities were still there...

Re:Not Much Cross-Platform

[BlackSabbath]

Whole-heartedly agree. Skim has made getting through my Master's degree much easier. The ability to highlight (markup in many ways) and add text notes directly on the page make this awesome.

Re:Not Much Cross-Platform

[mjwx]

Sumatra PDF: Looks good.

I switched from Foxit to Sumatra PDF when the flashing banner ad in Foxit became too annoying. Sumatra handles displaying PDF's on a Windows box far better and doesn't seem to have the same issues when printing a colour PDF, Foxit would take 5 minutes to send it to the printer. Sumatra doesn't do everything, its a small light PDF viewer that has a quick load time, which is exactly what most people are after with a PDF viewer.

Needed feature

[geminidomino]

Since my profs and TAs seem to love Acrobat's "comments"(those stupid yellow icons that display on a mouseover), are there any on linux that will display them? I've had no luck with Evince or Okular on hardy.

I'm waiting for the...

[mysidia]

Adobe suggests ditching F-Secure for other anti-malware products.

But that won't happen and people aren't going to switch PDF readers, until the security software itself starts identifying Acrobat installations as riskware and displaying dialog boxes alerting users to the security risk and what actions they need to take (what types of alternatives are available to use)..

So what's the best reader for Windows

[Animats]

All I need is a PDF reader that will render correctly, won't create security problems, and will run on Win32. What's current thinking on this? The alternatives listed:

• MuPDF Seems to be mostly a demo for a new graphics library.
• Okular Does that even run on Windows? The table says yes, but the site says no.
• Sumatra PDF Do I want to trust something that comes from "blog.kowalczyk.info"?
• Yap Just a front end for GhostScript, which does a mediocre job on PostScript.

PDF comments on linux

[mu22le]

bump [sorry :(]

I have exactly the same problem, I'd choose free software over closed source any time, but AFAIK there is no libre pdf reader that support reading (not to mention writing) comments, that's why I keep an old copy of acrobat 7 around (much faster and less bloated that newer versions)

Does anyone know an alternative?

Re:Already there

[emm-tee]

Like Firefox? They've perfected the way they do updates.

Unless you use Windows XP and don't run as administrator.

Updates don't work for non-administrator accounts. This resulted failures where an update had been downloaded but could not be applied.

The Firefox developers "fixed" this issue by not even notifying the user when updates are available. [mozilla.org]