Since its introduction in the early 90's Adobe's pdf format has quickly established itself as the global standard to create and view electronic documents. One of the many advantages of the format is that it allows you to present documents almost the same way as paper based documents and that you can download the free adobe pdf reader to view and work with the documents. In fact is has become so popular that almost 500 million copies of the reader are in use worldwide and the number is growing very rapidly. However, you can also read pdf documents with alternative viewers and combined you are looking at almost a billion installed pdf viewers. The pdf format has come a long way since its introduction in the early 90's. Originally designed and developed for the Apple Macintosh it was intended to offer an easy way to save documents in a format that can easily be used on Macintosh platforms as well as Windows platforms. Initially the reader was not free though. Adobe was charging $50 per user, which was a very steep price tag for consumers. But thankfully for consumers the US tax department, the IRS, decided to make pdf documents the standard format for its forms and purchased a distribution license for the reader which allowed it to start giving away the reader for free. Adobe soon realized that it did not make sense trying to sell a product that you could download free on the IRS website and started offering the reader software for free. Over the years, the software emerged as an essential tool for almost every computer user. As of today, the software is available in 28 languages and supports every character set in use anywhere in the world. With the massive success of the reader, it does not come as a surprise that the pdf format and the reader quickly became an attractive target for the hackers and cybercriminals trying to cash in on the extensive worldwide distribution and the widespread use of the pdf format. Since its introduction, numerous vulnerabilities have been found, exploited, and closed over the years. Critics are highlighting several supposed flaws of adobes reader, claiming that it is bloated and slow, and a constant threat to the security of the user as it supports Java script with only minimal protection. Adobe has been slow to react to this criticism, partly because of the great success and the ever-increasing number of installations. Finally, since the release of version 7 Adobe started taking the critics seriously and worked on improving the performance substantially.

Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Contact