[Editor's Note: To avoid confusion and spreading of mis-information, I feel it's my duty to state that Adobe later changed their decision about removing the SVG Viewer download from their site. As of Dec 2006, Adobe has decided to keep the viewer download available indefinitely.]

In an effort of good will, Adobe has modified their plans to End-of-Life their widely used SVG Viewer plugin. The new plan is for support to end January 1, 2008 and for downloads of the viewer to end by January 1, 2009. Looks like all the blog complaints helped. Here's a link to the FAQ (in PDF format, of course! 😉 ).

Some interesting tidbits from the FAQ:

  • The Adobe SVG Viewer is not supported on Windows Vista. Seems like it will work, but the View Source and proprietary audio extensions are known to be broken.
  • Adobe will not be releasing the source for ASV
  • I also appreciate that under the question What products can I use instead of ASV?, Adobe left a link to the http://wiki.svg.org/Viewer_Implementations instead of just trying to push Flex down our throats. They also put in some useful SVG community links at the end of the FAQ.


§283 · October 11, 2006 · Adobe, QuickLinks, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · · [Print]

4 Comments to “Adobe Extends EOL for SVG Viewer (whew!)”

  1. Paul says:

    Did you realize the unagitated ASV promotion at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/starter-edition/map 😉

  2. Jeff says:

    Nice link, Paul. I wonder who we have to talk to let Firefox and Opera try to render the SVG on their own…

  3. john says:

    Does another viewer support SVG on Vista without problems? and what are exactly the problems with the Adobe Viewer. what is ment ( mean ment ment?) with ” but the View Source and proprietary audio extensions are known to be broken”
    because I don’t have Vista I can’t guess what it means.
    Does it ment that you can’t see the source code when your’e site is on the net and you’ve got problems with the sound?
    please let me know

  4. John,

    I don’t know myself what this means because I don’t have Windows Vista – if you find out from Adobe, please let me know.

    Renesis is working on developing a browser plugin for SVG – they’re alpha software is not yet ready to replace ASV. Another option is to use Batik in Applet form.

    Regards,
    Jeff