I’m getting straight to the point here: By fighting I mean Microsoft are incorporating Acrobat Reader INTO their Edge webbrowser. Yep, you read that right. They are building Acrobat’s PDF-engine into Edge. Microsoft and Adobe have partnered up for replacing the existing PDF-engine in Edge.

By default, PDFs in Windows opens in Edge. This hasn’t always been the best solutions as many workflows is dependent on Adobe Reader in one way or another. Either the technology or the humans. This is about to change. Gone is the management of an extra software installation on every PC, and in comes full compatibility (I hope) with the PDF-viewer we all love. And one less app to manage with updates etc.

So, when will these changes take place? The first wave is rolling out in September 2023. For managed devices via Intune, it’s the same but you will be able to opt in so you can test and verify it’s features and abilities from this month (march, as I’m writing this…). And all of this will be completely rolled out by April 2024 for everyone.

And even better, if you want to edit those PDFs you can via Adobe’s subscription model do this via a browser extension. Neat!