Lyudmil Tsvetkov wrote:3.) How do I know the source is OK? Sometimes it is simply not possible to recognise, so close, so undistinguishable.
That is a problem, yes. Even more so because sometimes, you have sites pretending to offer software X, but in fact, they are fakes offering malware. What I do is googling for the software, then going to Wikipedia and verifying what is the official homepage. Maybe, you have to put in both the software name and the term Wikipedia to get the search result.
4.) Similarly for pam, some are very quiet up until the moment they explode, you don't even have to open an attachment, it just opens in and of itself...
I remember that Outlook may have issues here where just the preview activates things. I'm using Thunderbird as mail client:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird
5.) I don't have Java plug-in, but every site around asks you for Flash installation...
Just don't do it. Flash is dead because iDevices don't support it. Mostly, you still can get reduced functionality on the website, but otherwise, just drop the website. If they are so backwards in web technology, the rest of the company will not be better. And Flash is full of security holes, it's really that bad. It's like Swiss cheese with so many holes that you rather have to look for the cheese.
Even worse, almost all my current work has to do with Adobe pdf reader..., but I guess you exaggerate a bit here.(anyone can confrim it is bad to have Adobe pdf reader installed?)
Adobe is patching the reader left and right. The problem is that PDF supports scripting, which means to execute programs inside the reader. As soon as there are holes (and they are - it's Adobe), the program may leave the reader and do dangerous things. The point is that for just reading PDFs, the whole scripting just isn't necessary.
Use Sumatra for pure PDF reading - it doesn't support PDF scripting to begin with, and it's blindingly fast. See here (at the right under "Website"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumatra_PDF . It doesn't offer all of the features, like adding comments or filling out forms, but for reading-only, it's fine.
Other choices are Firefox and Chrome, but with what would they be better?
At least with not supporting ActiveX. Since that technology is Microsoft-only, and since Microsoft is pretty irrelevant on the browser market these days, there's no point in using ActiveX on legitimate websites anyway.
The whole amount of viruses is not normal. I'm using the internet mostly as an incredibly large library for a lot of different topics, from looking up electronic circuits data sheets to the evolution of shrimps. I'm visiting tons of different websites, but no issues.