Foxit Reader: A Free, Lightweight Adobe Alternative
September 4th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 13 Comments
If you’ve spent much time with Adobe’s applictions for working with PDFs, you know that they’re not the fastest applications under the sun, and they provide their share of annoyances when doing updates, and when uninstalling. For a free, alternative application you can turn to, Foxit Reader for Windows is a good choice. (There are also versions for Linux and mobile devices.)
Foxit Reader is much smaller than Adobe Reader, so one of the best things about it is how fast it loads and unloads. It also makes it easy to easy to convert PDF documents to text. The latest version 2.3 of the application, downloadable here, now includes multimedia features for playing the audio and video that sometimes accompany PDFs.
In the release notes for version 2.3 of Foxit Reader, you’ll find an inventory of the new additions. In addition to what has always been a very useful toolbar implementation, version 2.3 lets you open PDFs in multiple, tabbed instances, very much like working with a tabbed browser. There are also collaboration tools for annotating PDFs with text and more.
The multimedia features and collaboration features are good additions, but the reason I use Foxit Reader remains the speed. The application is a fraction of the size of Adobe Reader. I need to get in and out of PDFs frequently, and this application does it much faster than Adobe does.
How do you work with PDFs?
13 Comments Post your own comment
Thaer says: September 4th, 2008 4:30pm
Foxit reader is the best, been a foxit user for a couple of years now, got sick and tired of adobe for the same reasons above.
once it was on my machine, i never ever thought of downloading adobe pdf when i format my windows
I never noticed they have a linux version, i’ll install it on my fedora, thanks for that!
Sam C says: September 4th, 2008 4:52pm
Unless I’m missing something it’s not free at all. It has a one year trial, and to make the trial ‘free’ they simply make you buy some software from a partner instead?
jonpeltier says: September 4th, 2008 6:27pm
I discovered Foxit a couple months ago, and I love it.
To create PDFs I use PrimoPDF and PDFCreator, both free, both very nice.
joe btsfplk says: September 4th, 2008 6:58pm
The reader is free. If you want Foxit Pro for “free,” you need to go through the TrialPay rigamarole. Just click on the Download icon for the reader.
April says: September 4th, 2008 8:42pm
I’ve been using Foxit for the same reasons. I use PDf files a lot and Adobe was always too slow and would even freeze my entire computer sometimes.
I’ve also got the Firefox extension that gives you the option of viewing PDF links as HTML but they don’t always ‘translate’ well.
ignar says: September 4th, 2008 9:44pm
I’ve used Foxit for many years, but recently switched to PDF-Xchange Viewer. It is slightly slower in starting up, but has more features and seems more polished. Things I don’t like about Foxit is it has tendency of screwing up toolbars (I had to press Alt-F8 many times), and rendering appears less optimal than others. Also I often need to make simple annotations such as underlines or highlights and those features were not free with Foxit and I was forced to fire up Acrobat for simple annotations. PDF-Xchange solved this problem. If you like Foxit, give PDF-Xchange a try. You may like it.
Chris Lee says: September 4th, 2008 11:05pm
I discovered Foxit only recently but have already found the benefits of the smaller memory footprint and fast loading on PDFs.
It’s also available as an MSI for installing through Windows Server Group Policy, and this makes it an attractive option for business networks.
An excellent alternative to the somewhat bloated Acrobat Reader.
Steistas says: September 4th, 2008 11:59pm
I’ve been using Foxit Reader for a while, the only problem I found with it – printing in A2, A1 and A0 sizes. It just goes blank and non-responsive (in Windows XP). Otherwise it’s a great software and very easy to make it portable too.
foaf says: September 5th, 2008 7:11am
two words: tabbed pdfs
Foxit Reader, un alternativa a Adobe | Codigo Geek says: September 5th, 2008 10:50am
[...] WWD encuentro algo que anduve buscando el otro día: un lector de PDF más liviano que el de [...]
Read PDF Files with a Fast Reader | Enquiring Mimes says: September 5th, 2008 6:27pm
[...] Download Foxit Reader [Via WebWorkerDaily] [...]
Michael Horowitz says: September 6th, 2008 12:32pm
If you download the .zip version of the Foxit reader, it is portable. See
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13554_1-9937346-33.html
Webmaster Tools » Blog Archive » Adobe Search Engine Results says: September 6th, 2008 6:50pm
[...] Comment on Foxit Reader: A Free, Lightweight Adobe Alternative by … [...]