Microsoft Decides to Let Adobe Acrobat Handle PDFs in the Edge Browser

This news will be nightmare fuel for any system administrators who were around during the Adobe Flash days.

Microsoft is updating the Edge browser to ship with Adobe software built-in, which is news that will surely make more than a few Windows users break out in a cold sweat.

In what the two companies describe as "the next step in their commitment to transform the future of digital work," the built-in PDF reader Edge uses will soon be powered by Adobe's Acrobat PDF engine. Microsoft says this will allow for more accurate colors and graphics, better performance, and "strong security." Microsoft decided to write a separate post that goes in-depth on how the PDF stack is being secured in a bid to "make exploits hard."

Adobe Flash and its associated Flash Player may be a distant memory now, but it's hard to forget the security nightmare it caused on multiple occasions, including being used to deliver the notorious FinSpy spyware onto computers. The situation was so dire, a website was setup whose sole purpose was to "get the world to uninstall the Flash Player plugin from their desktop browsers."

The built-in PDF reader Adobe provides will be free, but Microsoft points out an Acrobat subscription is available if users want more features beyond just reading PDFs. A separate browser extension is required to unlock those feature within Edge. There's no detail given on if Acrobat will be advertised within Edge once it's the default engine.

Microsoft will be switching from the existing Edge PDF legacy engine to the Adobe Acrobat PDF rendering engine in phases. Those phases start next month, and the legacy engine is expected to be completely removed from Edge by March 31, 2024. And remember, you can't uninstall Edge in Windows, which means you won't be able to uninstall Acrobat either.

Microsoft and Adobe have committed to working together across a range of software and services. Adobe's PDF, e-signature, and document automation tools are already being used in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Edge is just the latest to join that list.

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