One thing about Adobe products is that changes come quickly. Unfortunately, that’s due, in large part, to their ever-present security vulnerabilities. Of course, Flash and Acrobat are the targets because of their overwhelming market share. Hackers always gravitate to where the most potential victims are. Adobe, for their part, has become pretty good at getting out the updates to try and stay one step ahead of trouble. Since they pop up notifications about updates most users probably stay pretty close to current, but there are always stragglers and procrastinators.
If you aren’t keeping track, we are currently at Flash version 11 and Acrobat version X. And, just a little while ago, Adobe announced that they will be ending support for Flash and Acrobat versions 8. Adobe released a technote about it explaining the end-of-support process and what you can expect, but an Adobe rep summed it up with the simple “Upgrade… as quickly as possible.”
Adobe provides five years of product support, starting from the general availability date of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. In line with this policy, support for Adobe Reader 8.x and Adobe Acrobat 8.x will end on November 3 2011.
End of Support means that Adobe no longer provides technical support or distributes runtimes. This policy affects product and security updates for all derivatives of a product or product version (localized versions, minor upgrades, operating systems, dot and double-dot releases, and connector products.)
As noted above, support will end on November 3rd, which is now less than a month away. Most people should already have upgraded, and hopefully kept up with security updates, but if you haven’t then go do so now. If you would like more information, you can read the entire technote.
Making the switch to Mac OS/X a few years ago as my primary computing platform was not without its sacrifices. Among these was Adobe Audition. Sure, I could use Audition in a Windows virtual machine, but it just wasn’t the same thing and entailed its own sacrifices.
