Adobe to unveil updater tool with quarterly release

Adobe plans to officially roll out its new automatic updater feature when it releases patches on Tuesday for Reader and Acrobat.

The new tool, in beta since October, is designed to "keep end-users up to date in a much more streamlined an automated way," Steve Gottwals, a software product manager, said in a blog post on Thursday. Users must opt in before they can receive the updates and then they can decide when the updates should be installed. Customers will be able to activate the feature by going to Edit>Preferences>Updater.

"The new updater has been optimized for each platform, and as you will notice, on Windows offers an option called 'Automatically install updates,'" Gottwals said. "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."

PDFs are the most commonly exploited document file, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, a security firm.

"The majority of attacks we are seeing are exploiting software installations that are not up-to-date with the latest security fixes," Gottwals said. "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."

On Tuesday, Adobe expects to ship Reader and Acrobat 9.3.2 and 8.2.2 for Windows and Macintosh users. The company issues quarterly security updates.