[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.]

Via JD on EP. Adobe announces End-Of-Life for SVG Viewer. I've tried to keep optimistic about the Adobe purchase of Macromedia but I guess I always knew it was a matter of time before Adobe draws the line and says "No more open standards". It's unfortunate because it was the one thing that I still liked about Adobe - I can't stand their bloated PDF viewer, FrameMaker or Photoshop anymore.

I think at the very least, Adobe should take into account former employee Jon Ferraiolo's suggestions. Since the Adobe SVG Viewer is the only realistic and mature option for SVG content in Internet Explorer for the conceivable future, removing it as a download in January 2008 could only be taken as an openly hostile move against the SVG development community. Even if IE8 moved fast and included some support for SVG it would not be truly ready for primetime by the time Adobe removes its download.

If we don't receive any concessions from Adobe on this, what is the development community left with? Develop an IE browser plugin out of Mozilla? A Batik-based browser plugin? Do we look to Amanith or Renesis?

Personally I'm going to keep my eye on Dojo2D since it's been in my mind for some time that I need to start moving up the stack in terms of web development anyway.