Short Rant: Adobe - Patch THIS! (UPDATED)

Holy crap. Really? ANOTHER set of patches for Flash? This is the second time in 9 days that Adobe has issued a "zero-day" patch that affect Flash (and also, Google's Chrome browser that includes Flash). Oh yeah, and it also updated Adobe Reader and Acrobat fixing 13 MORE vulnerabilities at the same time.

If you use Gmail - you REALLY, REALLY need to make sure that you've got the latest patch - because on June 5th Adobe issued an "emergency" patch to fix a vulnerability that would allow nefarious baddies to steal your Gmail login credentials.

I don't know about you - but I have more than one device that uses Flash. I use Google's Chrome browser at work (3 Windows machines), at home (2 Macs + 6 virtual OS instances) - and I'm just getting pretty damn tired of updating all this stuff - all the time. But yet, if Adobe comes out with a "critical" patch - and you ignore it - your machine might get hacked - or your identity stolen.

Really? Identity theft from a browser plug-in used to play media or display a PDF document?

I'm especially worried about those "less technically savvy" people in my life - since I'm the "family IT guy." If they don't patch, it means I'm going to have to do all kinds of stuff to un-gunk their computers - because (technically inclined brethren) you KNOW they DO click on every single "pretty picture" on every single site they visit on the inter-web.

Now, I love PDFs - don't get me wrong - and because reader is now installed on 95%+ of all computers in the world - getting away from using it will be a challenge.

For those of you who are really smart out there - why don't you come up with a PDF to HTML5 converter that would just bundle up the PDF into a double-clickable HTML document? At least then we could be free from the eternal Adobe Patch Cycle...

... until someone hacks HTML5 readers... sigh.

UPDATE June 17, 2011 - Well, it seems as though the good folks over at Mozilla are SICK of the buggy Adobe Reader as well - and are going to build an extension (and eventually put into the codebase)... wait for it... a 100% HTML5/JavaScript PDF rendering engine! Hot off the wire from ComputerWorld:

Mozilla is working on a project that will add PDF rendering to Firefox using HTML5 and JavaScript, eliminating the need for users to run Adobe's own plug-in.

We can only HOPE the other browser folks get behind the open-source pdf.js project as well! God speed Mozilla folks!