El Reg reports that Adobe spends much effort on Acrobelfry security updates ensuring that they won't crash end users' systems:
The last thing we want to do is ship a release that blue screens hundreds of millions of machines.
Er.
The ability of Acrobat Reader to do that sort of thing has bothered me for many years. Why the smeg does a freaking document reader need the sort of privileges that allow blue-screening a computer, being a conduit for malware, and so forth? And why should an update to a document reader require a reboot?
Really, now: what privileges does a document reader need, anyway? Display graphics, read files, save files, and print, right? Same as any mundane app? So how come it gets all hooked into the OS? Is this because of yet another inadequacy in Windows, or is it just psychotic app design?
And, Adobe: as long as I'm ranting, here's one of my favorites: fix the stupid Postscript printing, will ya? I'm currently on Linux, with a printer that speaks BR-script, but I've also seen this on Windows with a printer that spoke genuine Adobe Postscript: for some PDF documents, Acrobat, on printing to a Postscript printer, will produce totally b0rked Postscript, causing the printer to barf with a syntax error, stack overflow, or similar, sometimes immediately and sometimes after a few pages. Alternative PDF viewers will generally print the same document, to the same printer, just fine. The problem's been there for at least a decade; it's like nobody at Adobe even cares about Postscript any more.
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