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Updating the Adobe Acrobat Reader

The self-update process for the Adobe Acrobat Reader may give you a false sense of security

Michael Horowitz

Michael Horowitz wrote his first computer program in 1973 and has been a computer nerd ever since. He spent more than 20 years working in an IBM mainframe (MVS) environment. He has worked in the research and development group of a large Wall Street financial company, and has been a technical writer for a mainframe software company.

He teaches a large range of self-developed classes, the underlying theme being Defensive Computing. Michael is an independent computer consultant, working with small businesses and the self-employed. He can be heard weekly on The Personal Computer Show on WBAI.

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Michael Horowitz

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the many software products that had recently been updated with important bug fixes. Among these was the Adobe Acrobat Reader whose self-updating feature is invoked with Help -> Check for Updates...

There is a bug, however, in the self-update process.

On a Windows XP machine running version 8.1.0 of the Adobe Acrobat Reader, the self-update scan found an available update to version 8.1.1. The install of this update ran just fine. Someone who knew that the Adobe Reader needed to be updated, would think they had done their due diligence and move on. The problem is, the latest version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader is 8.1.2.

These are the worst types of bugs, those where everything seems to be OK. And, bugs in the software designed to fix bugs, is irony at its best.

It used to be that when you downloaded the Adobe Acrobat Reader, you got an old version with known bugs. At least, Adobe has corrected that. Fresh installations of the software currently install version 8.1.2.