PDF Dangers

You probably should stick with the official mac version

Foxit is pretty good, be careful when you install so as to avoid a toolbar & some other stuff.

point being that there are choices, but they require you spend some time making it happen

I was getting annoying adobe updates daily and they seem to be coming from the same update file that was lingered in the user library folder.

I searched the mac's hard drive for adobe updater and deleted several "plist" files that contained that name.

I have the installed disk, so I was not too worried about messing things up. That seem to do the trick and I have not been plagued with it since.

Oh yeah, Acrobat still works just fine.

1. Foxit Reader beats Adobe in functionality, is not subject to excessive updates.

2. The dangers of *.pdf files appears to lie in the fact that malicious code can be embedded in the actual text documents as macros (similar problem with Excel files and, to some extent, Word documents), not necessarily in the Adobe software and updates.

3. There is a war going on between Apple and Adobe, which is not doing us common folk any favors.

4. The most practical solution is to load a Linux version onto your Mac in dual boot, and use the Linux installation for all of your web applications (Ubuntu comes with a built-in "Document Viewer" for reading *.pdf files, and several other options for dealing with *.pdf files, some included in the basic package, and some which must be added by the user). Some of the more sophisticated functions of Foxit reader (highlighting, underlining, adding notes- free features in Foxit for Windows which you have to pay for if you want to use Acrobat Reader) do not work in Linux (at least through the last upgrade I tried with Foxit for Linux- this may have improved recently).

5. Apparently, Apple, having dropped "computer" from their name, is less interested in legacy support than they are in expanding into newer market areas. There is the possibility that their customer support infrastructure is suffering...

Since I did delete all after a shut down I seem to be okay for now.

By dual boot do you mean download, shut down, then turn on, and shut down? -Sortah like double clutching where you clutch to neutral, and then clutch to gear?

Garthh warned some about a need for one to know what you are doing downloading the Foxit to avoid toolbar clutter? - least that's how I read it.

Dual boot is where you have two different operating systems on the machine at one time- supposedly, Macs allow you to run as many as you want. I have also heard that on a MAC, you don't have to reboot to change operating systems, but I can't afford a MAC (even a Big Mac is out of the question these days)

VirtualBox (free) & Parallels (£$) are two options I've used. They allow a second operating system to run inside the host so programs from both can be used by simply clicking the appropriate window. For decontaminating an infected computer, using a "Live CD" (bootable) of a Linux OS to modify/remove the affected files is a good choice. With a Mac, there is a key to press during start-up which turns the machine temporarily into a firewire HDD to allow another Mac access to amend any corruptions.

What I mean is pay attention when you are installing, as the wizard runs there will be some checkboxes you can uncheck, so you don't receive emails or have a toolbar installed

just take your time during the install

I thought pdfs were photographs that were on a different file than Internet explorer and could be located in either pictures or documents.ds

I never use Adobe on my Mac - Preview does the job for looking at downloaded files, and my documents can be saved as pdfs by file/print/pdf(bottom left of pop-up window).....