On Tuesday, April 13, 2010, we are planning to release Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.3.2 and 8.2.2 as part of our regularly scheduled quarterly updates.
As mentioned in a previous blog post titled Adobe Reader and Acrobat Updates Include New Security Improvements, we have been testing a new updater technology with select beta customers since our October 13, 2009 quarterly update. The purpose of the new updater is to keep end-users up-to-date in a much more streamlined and automated way.
During our quarterly update on January 12, 2010, and then again for an out-of-cycle update on February 16, 2010, we exercised the new updater with our beta testers. This allowed us to test a variety of network configurations encountered on the Internet in order to ensure a robust update experience. That beta process has been a successful one, and we've incorporated several positive changes to the end-user experience and system operation. Now, we're ready for the next phase of deployment.
On Tuesday, April 13, 2010, as part of our quarterly update, we will activate the new updater for all users needing Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.3.2 and 8.2.2 for Windows and Macintosh. As of yesterday, April 7, 2010, we have been activating our new updater for those users who are not yet up-to-date with our latest versions. During this phase of the process, we are utilizing users' current update setting found in the Adobe Reader and Acrobat Preferences, under the "Updater" panel, as shown in the screen captures below.
The new updater has been optimized for each platform, and as you will notice, on Windows offers an option called "Automatically install updates." With this option, to avoid disturbing the user, the new updater favors a time when the system is not busy to install new updates without user intervention.
Honoring the user's choice is important to Adobe. This includes the user's update preferences. Adobe has no plans to activate the automatic update option by default without prior user consent. That said, the security of our users is a key priority for Adobe. The majority of attacks we are seeing are exploiting software installations that are not up-to-date with the latest security fixes. We therefore believe that the automatic update option is the best choice for most end-users. We are currently evaluating options for the best long-term solution for users, which could involve presenting the user with an opt-in screen for the automatic update option as part of the next phase in the roll-out. As always, we will continue to communicate important details with you at the appropriate time.
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