[oh_sigh]

Maybe it says something about a broken ecosystem when every user needs to go trawl search engines to find an application that can read and edit PDFs

[theamk]

Why do people need PDF readers anyway? Chrome browser and all the major OSs ship with one.

Is this because of the users of old Windows versions? If yes, then good news: once those disappear, those attacks would die off as well.

[TeMPOraL]

> Why do people need PDF readers anyway? Chrome browser and all the major OSs ship with one.

Because:

- Lost of places on the web, in particular official pages of various government institutions, are still stuck in the age of recommending Acrobat as required to open PDFs.

- Default readers, much like browsers themselves, are woefully inadequate for anything other than casual reading. In case of PDF, it's something where you'd like to be able to edit PDF forms and have a working annotation functionality.

Myself, I use a third party PDF reader on Windows (Drawboard PDF), because it's very touch and pen friendly - and I like to annotate my PDFs, for which a pen-capable device is extremely well-suited.

[kontackt]

thank you for explaining your end of this issue as some people do not see it this way and trolls are trolls i guess

[einr]

Because browser PDF viewers are very basic quick-and-dirty preview tools and lack a lot of features. The most glaring omission is fillable form support but there is a lot of other stuff that's missing or renders plain wrong.

[stevenjohns]

If you need support for OCGs (layers) or want to do additional markups or manipulation then you need a real PDF reader.

Consider how architects and engineers would use PDF plans of a high rise building.