Time to give Adobe Reader the shove
Today is the day that I finally give Adobe Reader the shove ... permanently.
Why? Because I've just come across a report of yet another vulnerability affecting the software (this affects Adobe Reader 9.1 and 8.1.4). Ugh. As someone who handles a lot of PDFs from a variety of sources, I'm always put a little on edge when a hole is discovered in my PDF reader.
A while ago I decided that it was probably a good thing to erase Adobe Reader out of existence and move onto a third-party reader such as the free (and quite excellent) Foxit Reader. I'm not under any illusions that Foxit Reader is 100% free from vulnerabilities all the time, and Foxit do release updates, but since Adobe's PDF reader is considered to be the 'default' then switching to something else makes good sense. I installed Foxit Reader on a few systems but I was rather half-hearted about eradicating the Adobe PDF Reader.
Today I've decided that it's time for Adobe's PDF Reader to go. I've used Secunia PSI to identify it on systems and replaced it with Foxit Reader. I feel safer already.
Other third-party apps that I've rolled out to almost all my systems are VLC media player and 7-Zip file compression tool.