acroBat out of 'ell

I now know why Acrobat 7 doesn't have Acrobat 8 as an upgrade. So far it seems to be a downgrade in ease of use and quite slow.

Now I upgraded because lately there have been several issues with Acrobat 7 that were not
present in Acrobat 8. Additional details on the vulnerabilities at the end for those that wish more information.

Anyway I decided to update to Acrobat 8 only to losefunctionality and speed.

Its interface has changed and not for the better. When displaying documents in MS IE you are choices are limited to the Icons at the top and options available when you right click on the document. it doesn't have the convenient e-mail this file icon you have to save the document and e-mail it outside of the window. I do receive documents generated on the web that I do have to e-mail. When a document is displayed with the wrong orientation your only choice is to right click "rotate clockwise" which works but may need 3 rotations opposed to one rotation counterclockwise.

Bottom line is that I'm going to try Foxit Software's PDF Reader (www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php) which is free and much smaller( the install program is about 1.5M compared to Adobe at about 20M.

Update 2-21-2007:

I find that Foxit works for over 99% of the time. the exception is when a site is specifically written to utilize Acrobat Reader

Vulnerability Details

The first was announced December 5th 2006 (http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb06-20.html) by Adobe, and either required a dll replacement or an upgrade to Acrobat 8.

The second was a cross site scripting vulnerability announced at the 23rd CCC in December 2006 (http://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/events/1602.en.html), and was not fixed by Adobe until about January 10th.