Another reason not to install Adobe PDF reader

[Len Dennis]

Adobe rolled out a set of patches for Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and Flash on Patch Tuesday this week, and the update had an unwelcome surprise in store for Chrome users. After updating their systems, they found that Chrome was prompting them to enable an extension from Adobe that was not asked for and was buried in a "security update" bolded talics mine.The extension does a couple of things; it provides a quick way to convert a Web page into a PDF if you have a full, paid version of Acrobat, and it lets you choose to open PDFs in Adobe Reader rather than using Chrome's built-in PDF support. This is occasionally useful for using PDF features that the browser-based support doesn't offer. The extension has existed for some years. The new, more aggressive distribution is new, however. The plugin seeks permission to do three things; "read and change all data on the websites you visit," "manage your downloads," and "communicate with cooperating native applications." The level of access required appears to be consistent with the plugin's stated purpose: as it can make a PDF of any page, it needs to have access to any page, and Chrome does not distinguish between extensions that read from pages and those that modify them.

There are plenty of free programs that you can install to read PDF's that don't do this sort of thing. The worst part about this is that the extention is useless unless you have the paid version of Adobe (but still phones the mothership with your user data even if you only have the free version). I don't and I don't know anyone that does.

http://arstechnica.com/information-...bundling-browser-plugin-with-security-update/

 

[ChuckO]

I use Firefox, and the free version of Adobe makes the firefox.exe*32 to swell the memory used until the browser finally crashes

 

[Len Dennis]

Ya, adobe software is really not written very well. That's another reason I won't use photoshop (assuming I could learn it ) is that any updates to the program are not done incrementally. You have to download the entire package (6-7-800 mb). Really not a nice way to do things.