Tag Archives: Adobe Reader
Chrome Beta Channel Gets its Update to Version 8, Finally
Posted on 04. Nov, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
5 Comments
We were starting to wonder what the problem was.
Although the Dev Channel of Chrome has been updated to version 9, Chrome Beta was still stuck at version 7. But now that there has been an update to version 8 for Chrome Beta we can see why. It appears that the teeming masses of people working on the Chromium project can’t compare to the team over at Adobe.
Specifically, Chrome 8 Beta has included a new version of Flash that was probably just finished up and is a plugin that is integrated into every release of the browser.
Other updates in include an integrated version of the PDF viewer, which actually is based off of the Foxit reader SDK as opposed to Adobe’s own Reader software. There are of course the requisite bug fixes included in the release.
About time, since the Beta and Stable Channels were running almost identical versions the last few days. Should it be a concern that Chrome releases get held up by third party software versions?
What Does Your Browser Say About You? Find Out With BrowserSpy
Posted on 13. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments
Your browser is very telling. And I don’t mean just what type of browser you use, but also your screen resolution, what version of Adobe Reader you have installed, whether you have Java installed and if so what version, what CPU you are running and CSS information that can show what sites you usually frequent:
All thanks to BrowserSpy. With this little website you can see just how much of you PC’s information is leaking all over the internet like a water balloon with a slight tear in it. Many people don’t realize this, and that’s why BrowserSpy’s founder, Henrik Gemal, set out to start a site that offers this information to the world. He keeps it updated, and keeps adding things that he finds which you may not know is available just by surfing the web.
Concerned about your privacy on the web? Chrome has options that allow you to turn off JavaScript, go into what’s know as Incognito Mode and there are also variations of Chromium open source builds that are built with privacy in mind. When I went to the BrowserSpy site with one of such browsers, known as Comodo Dragon, a few things were left undetected as I went through the list of tests on the left hand site of the site – but not everything.
At the same time, using Chrome with no privacy settings turned on, BrowserSpy pinpointed my IP address to somewhere north of Wichita Kansas on a Google Map. Which is highly incorrect. Maybe they don’t know that much about me.
Firefox Lorentz Emulates Chrome’s Stability Features
Posted on 09. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
ReadWriteWeb is reporting that the beta of Firefox 3.6.3, dubbed Lorentz, is testing a new feature in the browser where plugins are isolated by tab in the event that it crashes. This allows for a singular unstable tab to crash instead of the whole browser. This may sound familiar to those who use Chrome, and will be a new feature in a future stable release of Firefox.
What’s funny is that rival browsers are making no bones about taking Google’s browser ideas and turning them into their own. Microsoft’s IE8 InPrivate, which is the same thing as Chrome’s Incognito mode, comes to mind. Witness the crash screen in Lorentz compared to Chrome’s:
Heading down this path is great for browsers overall, but it seems funny at times when you see competing browsers copying Chrome’s functions in order to keep up with its frenetic pace of development. Indeed, Chrome has quickly gone from version 1.0 in 2008 to 4.0 stable a few months ago.
One of the reasons for early adoption has been Google’s decision to auto-update Chrome. While initially this was heavily criticized, you can see here how fast Chrome has migrated to newer versions because of this functionality:
While Firefox also pushes updates, users are prompted to install them. This may be less obtrusive in terms of privacy than Chrome, and still allows for a regular schedule of updates to the browser:
Microsoft does not prompt for IE updates leaving some users still stuck on IE6, although that metric is slowly changing:
You can try out the new Firefox Lorentz by downloading it from here. Lorentz only isolates QuickTime, Flash, and Silverlight as their own processes. You can, however, customize it to do so for other plugins such as Adobe Reader through these instructions.
Analysis: Who Benefits Most From the Chrome-Flash Collaboration?
Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 5 Comments
We all thought it was dead; in one fell swoop its back on the map.
It was rumored yesterday that Google and Adobe would work together to integrate Flash into the Chrome browser, and that rumor indeed came true. Now the development version of Chrome is capable of having Flash baked in, if you so choose. At some point in the near future, this will be implemented to all versions of Chrome. I think many are surprised by the move here, but at the same time this was decision that must have been was months in the making as Google becomes more of an adversary to Apple.
What happens here is a lesson of competitive advantage: Google plans on having a big share of the mobile market since they have watched what Apple has been able to accomplish with wireless phones and the hype over the iPad. So creating a strategic partnership with Mozilla and Adobe makes sense. Sure, Flash is not open source but it would not surprise me that there is some sort of agreement between Google and Adobe to start heading that way with Flash, seeing as how Google supports it with Chrome, Android, Chrome OS and other projects.
So Google gets a competitive advantage over Apple. What does Adobe gain? Well, in the future, everyone who uses Chrome will get Flash installed. Since most browsers today have it installed anyways, a logical step is to integrate it. Plus, most people don’t spend time updating Flash unless thye need to for running something in their browser that needs it, and that leaves users vulnerable to attack since older versions are more susceptible than the latest and greatest.
An auto-update allows users to be worry-free when it comes to Flash. Because most people don’t really care about Flash itself, they just want the interactive web to work as it should, right?
It’s been said that Adobe has struggled to keep Flash from being exploited, most likely due to the fact that before now Flash wasn’t a target of hackers. That’s no longer the case and it makes one wonder how this will affect Adobe’s other popular free software, Reader, which uses rather large PDF file formats that could contain malicious code.
So who gains the most? While Google getting a standard format integrated into Chrome is certainly a plus, it does make one wonder whatever happened to the huge push to HTML5, where video codecs are browser embedded and can play clips using a tag. Perhaps this is a reaction to the metrics recorded from the YouTube HTML5 beta, with Google realizing that Flash is so ubiquitous it is better off increasing support of the format that powers the biggest and potentially most profitable video site in the world.
Adobe gets exposure for their formats as a result of this, and it wouldn’t surprise anyone now that a seemingly resurrected Flash will allow them to continue to provide all sorts of web content to end users. They get the backing of Google which will challenge Steve Jobs’ assertion that Flash is full of bugs, and allow for a more secure experience because security sandboxing will be implemented. Not to mention the fact that auto-update will limit the amount of widespread attack that could possible. This could potentially motivate hackers to take on different, and perhaps more exploitable, targets that exist.
So for now Google wins, until we see Flash integrated in all the major browsers – which could be the next move since Mozilla also has an interest in this new collaboration.
