Edge And Adobe Conspire To Take Over Your Online PDFs

Just When You Thought Your Default App Might Be Safe

One thing that greets you when you first logon to a new Windows machine is Microsoft Edge reporting that there were problems with numerous apps and to resolve the problem, Microsoft Edge will be taking over that particular protocol.  That the only problem with the app is that it isn’t set to use Edge by default is besides the point.  Microsoft just wants you to have a chance to experience their new browser skin; at least for the moment it takes you to download Chrome in it’s original flavour … or whichever your preferred browser might be.

However it isn’t just webpages that Edge takes over, it also puts it’s paws on your PDFs and even after changing the default app to the PDF viewer of your choice, you will still often find Edge trying to display any PDFs you open while online.  Well, things are about to get even more annoying, thanks to a new team up.

Microsoft Edge and Adobe have joined forces to incorporate the Adobe Acrobat PDF rendering engine directly into new versions of Edge.  If you have laboured to give yourself piece of mind by removing Adobe from your machine it will be coming back, like it or not.  To be fair, the amount of critical vulnerabilities that Acrobat Reader brings to your computer have dropped over the years, many of us have enough memories of dealing with security issues to have a deep distrust of the program.

For now, the integration will be free and there will be ways for businesses to opt out of the update which consumers may also be able to leverage.  It is only a brief reprise however, as Bleeping Computer were told the Edge PDF renderer will hit end of life in 2024.