Microsoft will soon be making a big visual change to Edge on Windows 10 and 11. Adobe’s Acrobat rendering engine will replace the current, in-browser PDF reader. Concretely, this means that from now on the Adobe brand will be present in all the PDF images that you display in Edge.
Acrobat in Microsoft Edge is expected on Windows 10 and 11 devices starting in March 2023, when enterprise customers will get an opt-in option and an opt-out option for devices managed through the Intune policy.
Users will not be able to switch back to the old PDF engine after the update, and the rollout is expected to end in September 2023.
Partnership brings Adobe 1.4 billion users
Microsoft plans to retire the old PDF engine from its Chromium-based Edge browser on March 31, 2024, when the opt-out policy for business customers will end, and all instances of Edge will have the engine. Acrobat, according to a blog post.
Partnership brings Acrobat in Edge to 1.4 billion Windows 10 and 11 users, who will then have the option to subscribe to more advanced Adobe PDF features, like editing text and images in PDFs , converting PDF to other file formats and combining files. Subscriptions can be purchased through an Adobe Extension for Edge, while existing Adobe subscribers will not be charged for using the Acrobat Extension.
“The combination of Adobe and Microsoft is good for productivity and good for customers,” said Jared Spataro, vice president of Modern Work & Business Applications at Microsoft. “Adobe’s PDF technology in Microsoft Edge means users will have fast and secure access to essential digital document functionality.”
Major security work
The partnership is a major extension of the existing multi-year partnership between enterprise and cross-cloud productivity integrations, which so far hasn’t impacted customers much. Last year, they launched enterprise-focused integrations in Adobe Document Cloud and Microsoft Teams, including Adobe Sign in the Teams Approvals app, a live email signature tool for Teams, and a Teams integration with Adobe Acrobat .
Microsoft says the Acrobat-powered Edge reader will have “full feature parity” with the older Microsoft Edge PDF reader and that “no functionality will be lost.” Edge users can expect to see an “unobtrusive” Adobe branding in the bottom corner of the PDF display.
The move comes as Microsoft tries to boost Edge’s appeal to consumers with newly-integrated ChatGPT features in Edge and Bing. A sidebar in Edge has chat and compose functions that allow users to ask follow-up questions to Bing and have the AI compose messages on LinkedIn. Edge comes with Windows 11, but Chrome remains the dominant browser on Windows. Chrome’s share of all desktops is 66%, compared to Edge’s 10%, according to Statcounter Global Stats.
Some Windows developers have wondered about the impact on WebView2, Microsoft’s tool for integrating web content into applications, which has PDF printing capabilities. Microsoft employee Rick Turner said that WebView2 “will arrive when the time is right”.
Turner explained that the Adobe tag will only appear for those who are not Adobe subscribers: “The Adobe tag will not appear if someone logs in with an Adobe Acrobat login and uses the extension. Additionally, for the free experience, if you have a large PDF or zoom into the document, the attribution will disappear due to no blank space on the screen.”
Turner claims that “using the free PDF experience with the Adobe engine will not allow Adobe to collect any data about you.”
Microsoft has detailed some of the work it has done to secure the browser’s PDF stack. The Microsoft Edge Vulnerability Research team has been “heavily involved” in the process of integrating the Acrobat engine into Edge. This includes using security features developed by Google’s Chromium team to mitigate C++-related memory flaws, including MiraclePtr and cache memory analysis, and PartitionAlloc, Chromium’s memory allocator. . All of these tools help alleviate memory issues.
Microsoft also details its own contributions to Edge’s security mitigations.
“In addition to PartitionAlloc, we have ensured that a suite of additional technical countermeasures, also already in use across Microsoft Edge, are compatible with the new PDF stack. such as Intel’s new Control Flow Enforcement Technology (CET), enabled in Microsoft Edge with Update 94 for processors that support it, which complements Intel’s Control Flow Guard (CFG) technology. Microsoft.”
Source: “ZDNet.com”