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Adobe.... a risk ?

B

BoxerBoy

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 22, 2011
100
5
England
Reading a seemingly sensible article re. Mac security, I was surprised to see that it was advised to uninstall Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader, because these have been subject to security flaws in the recent past.

Do you agree that this is sensible, if so, what functions will I lose on my late MBP operating Lion.
 
BoxerBoy said:
Reading a seemingly sensible article re. Mac security, I was surprised to see that it was advised to uninstall Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader, because these have been subject to security flaws in the recent past.

Do you agree that this is sensible, if so, what functions will I lose on my late MBP operating Lion.
Click to expand...

os x can natively read PDFs so you won't need acrobat reader. I have used macs for 7 years now and have not ever needed acrobat reader and I am a graphic designer dealing with pdfs all the time.

Flash is dead these days anyway. HTML5 is the new thing so no need to worry about having flash at all. Flash is vulnerable on the web, particular in contact forms.
 
The internet is a security risk these days. Pick the poisons you are willing to live with. (e.g. flash, e-mail, java, etc...)
 
Thanks for your advice KingJosh, I shall remove both apps following your advice that they are not required.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
BoxerBoy said:
Reading a seemingly sensible article re. Mac security, I was surprised to see that it was advised to uninstall Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader, because these have been subject to security flaws in the recent past.

Do you agree that this is sensible, if so, what functions will I lose on my late MBP operating Lion.
Click to expand...

Adobe has long been the purveyor of some of the most insecure software on the planet, in close competition with symantec.

If you can live without any software, in general, get rid of it to reduce your exposure.

The reality on the mac is however that if you watch youtube in safari, you currently need flash (HTML5 video on youtube in safari is currently not very usable at all) - keep it up to date! AFAIK apple isn't distributing updates to flash anymore, so download the latest version from adobe, which will self-update.

Adobe reader? OS X has built in PDF support, get rid of it.
 
KingJosh said:
os x can natively read PDFs so you won't need acrobat reader. I have used macs for 7 years now and have not ever needed acrobat reader and I am a graphic designer dealing with pdfs all the time.

Flash is dead these days anyway. HTML5 is the new thing so no need to worry about having flash at all. Flash is vulnerable on the web, particular in contact forms.
Click to expand...

OP. KingJosh is right, flash will be gone some day. However it might takes some time for this to happen as many sites have not switched over to HTML5. I tried to do without it for a while on the PC side (recent mac convert) but had no choice but to put it back. As KingJosh has said HTML5 is the new thing and if you can do without it then give that a try. I tried and couldn't ;-) But again never had any security issues personally because if it.
 
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A good compromise:

Uninstall Flash and then get Google Chrome. Unlike other browsers, Chrome has its own built-in Flash plug-in. It doesn't use the regular plugin like Safari or Firefox do.

So then use your Flash-less normal browser most of the time and then fire up Chrome ONLY when you really need to see something in Flash. This doesn't protect you 100%, but it means you're unlikely to load Flash things by accident and you won't be leaving them running in the background either. You'll load them when you need them and then shut down Chrome when you don't.

It's a good compromise. (Although, to be fair, I'm looking at this from a system-resources view rather than a security view.)

PS ~ Make sure you're viewing the native h.264 files in Youtube. That alone cut my need for Flash by 90%.
http://www.youtube.com/html5
 
Every now and then we get a pdf created by MS Office. Possibly 2010. It comes up on my iPhone as grey lines on a white background instead of text. It looks the same in Preview on OSX including Lion and ML. This is the only reason I keep adobe acrobat around because MS Office is doing something weird when it creates pdf files. I do not make acrobat my default viewer and I only wind up having to deal with it once or twice a year.

As for flash, I enabled "click to play" in chrome so flash can't sneak up and run behind my back. When you use a browser created by an advertising company, it's funny how when flash is supposedly blocked, I still would see animated monkeys throwing stuff at my face and listen to silly noises until I finally upgraded my anti-flash arsenal to include click to play.
 
KingJosh said:
os x can natively read PDFs so you won't need acrobat reader. I have used macs for 7 years now and have not ever needed acrobat reader and I am a graphic designer dealing with pdfs all the time.
Click to expand...

After reading this I uninstalled Acrobat Reader and was pleased to note Preview did the job the next couple of times a reader was required.

However I have twice recently needed to read a PDF document and Preview did not pop up and do the job, so I have had to reinstall Adobe.

Am I missing something here, should I have done something to activate Preview.... I thought it would automatically download the PDF, am I wrong ?
 
BoxerBoy said:
After reading this I uninstalled Acrobat Reader and was pleased to note Preview did the job the next couple of times a reader was required.

However I have twice recently needed to read a PDF document and Preview did not pop up and do the job, so I have had to reinstall Adobe.

Am I missing something here, should I have done something to activate Preview.... I thought it would automatically download the PDF, am I wrong ?
Click to expand...

Duplicate one PDF document in the Finder, and open the file info dialog for the file. You can select in this info dialog, what you want to do in the future with all PDF documents. After the selection, you can delete the duplicated file, because the Finder modified the duplicate file, which is probably not what you want. The previous mentioned selection does not affect the "Open with..." contextual menu, so you can use the contextual menu to open newer PDFs with Adobe Reader (Adobe Reader supports always the newest PDF-version).

Safari can read PDFs, and you can open many PDFs directly in a Safari window. Safari has buttons which allow you to open the downloaded PDF in Preview.

If you want to elimate security risks within Firefox/Safari, then disable all not needed plugins, and enable them only, if you need them! I use only Flash on youtube.com, and disable it afterwards. Safari supports also HTML5-Video (H.264/ACC) on youtube, which is much better on computers which support hardware accelerated decoding of H.264 streams.

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Mattie Num Nums said:
Adobe at least patches its software.
Click to expand...
Wrong!

Adobe puts a price tag on security updates for Photoshop and others:
http://www.h-online.com/security/ne...updates-for-Photoshop-and-others-1571517.html

.
.
.
 
Mr. Retrofire said:
Duplicate one PDF document in the Finder, and open the file info dialog for the file. You can select in this info dialog, what you want to do in the future with all PDF documents.
Click to expand...

I have opened a duplicate PDF file in Finder, but cannot see how to select future action required. Could someone please advise in simple steps how to do this.
 
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