Get rid of the bloatware! The 1MB fully functional PDF Reader
This post was published 3 years 8 months 2 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.I hate bloat and spyware. Absolutely HATE IT! Adobe Reader (formerly Adobe Acrobat) is the #1 target in my workflow that is a necessary evil. When you begin to install the program it wants to clog your web browser with every toolbar known to man. It constantly pings back to Adobe to check for updates every time you launch it, and what is the deal with the Adobe download manager.
Enough is enough! I found a light PDF reader that does the trick. The Foxit PDF Reader is an alternative viewer/reader for PDF documents. Foxit PDF Reader is less than 1MB to download and doesn’t need lengthy installation (just download, unzip, and run). It works with all types of PDF documents you might have, with high display quality. Supports different languages including most Asian languages. You can zoom in/zoom out or rotate page display, copy text information to other application, search text in PDF document, and print PDF documents.
Take that Adobe, Your reader application will never touch my computer again. I HIGHLY recommend this to all PC users.
Been using that for a programm for easily a year or two.Its nice,really nice.
You can reach similar behavior by disabling unneeded plugins in the original adobe reader. You’ll get load times of under a second.
I’ve loaded this all almost every Windows computer that I have ever had to work on. No installer, no bloat, nearly no load time, and as light as a PDF reader possibly can be. Great stuff.
HELL. YES.
I’ve been using foxit for a year and a half. absolutely a must-have software.
too bad the computers at work still use Acrobat…
nice! question, though- It works great for pdfs on my drive, but when clicking a pdf link in firefox, it still tries to run adobe. (I uninstalled reader, and firefox wants to reinstall the adobe plugin). Is there a plugin for foxit? Ideas?
scratch that- stupid question. got it figured out.
sky, how did you figure it out? I am having the same problem.
I didnt so much solve it, I just did a workaround. Uninstalled Adobe Reader, closed firefox, opened it and found a pdf link. When it asked what do to, I just set it to “open with..” and pointed to foxit.
Alternately, you can go to Tools->Options->View & Edit Actions-> find pdf files and change the action. Hope that helps-
I have Acrobat so I can make PDF’s. Can I still use this w/o screwing them both up?
Yup Jerry!
Now, If you had just gotten a Mac in the first place, you’d have Preview for PDF’s, and the ability to print to PDF built into the operating system. ;)
Terrific! Great… That makes me happy
foxit crashes my printer…
so i use foxit to read pdfs cuz it’s so bloody fast
and i’m stuck using adobe to print
so all in all…foxit is great..but it acts up sometimes
mjbdvkjb
Dude…
Use this, http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator/ to create PDFs for FREE!
ikonQ:
ever wonder why Mac ‘people’ are so annoying to Windows ‘people’?
no matter how many smilies you(all) use it still feels condecending and arrogant
I like foxit, however it crashes my printer and also many times the text comes out blank (abscense of fonts I guess) though adobe reader prints it perfectly
only because you know they are right lol. i suffer with windows btw :p
Sky and Eddie�
You can also get this to work with the Firefox PDF Download extension, although changing the default behavior is cleaner and more elegant.
Arun�
I have had it crash with network printing, but I’ve never lost fonts. I wonder what’s causing that?
Hi
The problem I have with Foxit is it shows that sidebar in the left whenever I open PDFs with multiple pages and it doesn’t have “Fit Visible”.
Is there a workaround for this ?
Thanks
Sohil
I love FoxIt, although I did find it somewhat naked it at times. I highly recommend it though. I for one use VisageSofts eXpert PDF reader. Loads as fast as FoxIt, none of the crap, and it looks good. Here is a link to their site.
http://www.visagesoft.com/products/pdfreader/
Because it doesn’t need to be installed, FoxIt is also an excellent portable app to stick on your USB thumbdrive.
Also, the best (by far) free PDF creation utility I have used to date is CutePDF. You’ll still want to have a copy of Acrobat Standard if you want to do “fancy” stuff with your PDFs like bookmarks, security options, default viewing options, et cetera but free is free.
You are da man! Thank you for showing us this!
Its lightning fast .. In FF it loads the PDF in application and not in Browser itself . .Is there a browser plugin for this ?
Curious, does Foxit have an option to convert PDF to TXT? It’s a niche use, but TXT’s kinder to screen reading technology, which I use. So I like to convert large PDF’s to TXT’s. If this is there, I’m definitely investigating. Adobe just irritates me.
What about gsview and ghostscript? Free as in speech and beer. Displays and prints PDFs.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/
I use this for some time now, I really don’t understand that Adobe Reader is something like a 60mb download. while Foxit does the same thing and is only 1mb the only problem i used to have with it is that it did not support transparent PNS’s. Now that is fixed Foxit works as good as Adobe Reader here. Which really makes me wonder why Adobe Reader its file size is so big.
Good work, publicising alternatives to Adobe is a good idea at the moment. I wrote about acrobat a while ago in a piece called “The Screaming Child of Software” and since then they’ve been taking it fairly heavily :)
When I used Windows I hated PDF, because it worked horribly there (but what doesn’t work bad on Windows?). Linux somehow changed my attitude, thanks to fast and lightweight built-in readers. But the final revelation was Mac OSX. See, Mac OSX has what it’s called a PDF monitor: it’s built in into the graphic system on a very low level, and is extremely fast, as a web page opening or even faster at tmes. Printing documents as PDF files, saving them – built in.
How PDF should work in any operating system.
Not to take away from Foxit, which is a fine product, but why put up with Adobe Reader’s default settings? You can make PDFs show outside the browser with a setting, you can disable the version update setting, and you just disable the toolbars it installs in Explorer and elsewhere. Plus dozens of other settings. It just sounds like you’re complaining about software that you did not bother to learn how to set up.
Last I checked, Adboe won’t let Microsoft ship integrated PDF functionality in its products…
Adobe Threatens Microsoft
I’ve tried it. It’s good!
For publishing PDFs, I strongly recommend PDF995. It isn’t free, it costs – yes, you guessed it – $9.95. But, it just works, and unlike CutePDF – and all the other CuteCRAP – it doesn’t load spyware on your machine.
“It just sounds like you’re complaining about software that you did not bother to learn how to set up.” – *Ordinant*
That’s complaint-worthy. Requiring users to “opt-out” of slow, fat, and crappy defaults is unacceptable. (Sadly, it’s common practice.) We’re talking about the default installation of a viewer intended for use by nearly everyone — as an add-on, not a high-end database server.
I’ve been using Foxit for about a year. Good stuff.
Ordinant –
I highly customize my computers, however I think everyone that programs are way too bloated. If a 1MB program solves my problems, instead of a 20, so be it!
Foxit Reader is excellent for day-to-day use but when dealing with PDFs containing dozens of electrical diagrams Adobe Reader is much better. I tried to get my work to use Foxit Reader but after seeing it hang when loading these huge PDFs I apologised and removed it.
It still is great for personal use, though.
Finally! I could never understand why acrobat reader needs like 30 MB to show a PDF.. This is more like it.
Thanks a lot, you’ve made a new friend ;)
I agree that Foxit is a good alternative to Adobe Reader. Moreover it is portable software this is a great advantage. Can any body suggest a portable small pdf writer? Open Office is cool but very big and resource hungry. Thanks.
I’m no PDF expert but the text quality did not seem as crisp as it does for adobe. Does anyone know if there is a setting I need to modify?
This is interesting. I must try it out on my home desktop computer which uses Windows. My sister and I read a lot of PDFs so this is going to be useful.
Yeah, love Foxit too! Installed it on every machine that I could get hold of. One issue, though – has no ability to fill forms in PDF. But in a year and a half that I’ve been using Foxit, I needed this feature only once.
So what about a pda reader????
Why spend $9.95 for a pdf publisher? check out pdfcreator, its free software under the GPL and it does an excellent job
In response to:
JYAWB
For publishing PDFs, I strongly recommend PDF995. It isn’t free, it costs – yes,
you guessed it – $9.95. But, it just works, and unlike CutePDF – and all the other
CuteCRAP – it doesn’t load spyware on your machine.
Dude, do some research next time. CutePDF is amazing! I used to use PDF995 but then their free version kept putting a watermark on all the documents I made. I chose CutePDF when I was looking for an alternative to PDF995 and haven’t looked back since. And NO, there isn’t any spyware. I presume you’re thinking of the “Cute” line of software such as CuteFTP and CuteFTPServer, etc. That is a DIFFERENT company.
CutePDF from http://www.cutepdf.com is 100% free, and 100% free of bloatware/spyware. It utilizes Ghostscript to operate and CutePDF is just a GUI front-end for Windows. I recommend to all those who want to be able to make their own PDF’s for archival or distribution to give CutePDF a try. You won’t be sorry.
Just downloaded foxit. Fixes *EVERYTHING* that was wrong with acrobat reader (in my opinion)!
- Slow Loading times -> gone
- Slow Scrolling through PDF -> gone
- Acrobat crashing periodically (almost always) -> gone
- etc..
Yes, adobe acrobat sucks the big one.
Well…. for creating PDF’s, I use Open Office. It is a “built-in” feature. Why have two programs when one will surfice. (This is for creation only).
i used to use PDF995 but got tired of the nagware aspect whenever i printed. i now use primoPDF, which is free and works quite well. http://www.primopdf.com/
This is incredible! Not only does it load PDF’s quickly, it allows much faster and smoother navigation (scrolling and page switching). Now the default reader. I’ll be checking out the other suggestions listed above, though.
I always thought that Adobe had some kind of legal lockdown on PDF creation and reading, so I never bothered to look for an alternative.
Hey if you want to open PDF in Firefox use this!
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/636/
If you need a really fast pdf creator / pdf reader / pdf editor, check out nitro pdf professional (www.nitropdf.com). I’ve been using it for the past 6 months and absolutely love it! It loads PDFs MUCH MUCH faster than Acrobat and has really useful features that Acrobat doesn’t (I use bates numbering and the build bookmarks feature daily).
Seems there are loads of people here advertising their own wares.
WTF is the deal with the Adobe Download Manager. Isn’t downloading a built-in feature of most web browsers?
[...] Thanks to Dan, who has introduced this in his site, and has highly recommend every user to give it a try. If you don’t agree with me, check out those users’ comments from his site. [...]
I was using FoxIt for all my work flow and Design jobs for over a year, until the latest edition of the software failed me…
Turns out that pre-press rendered documents do not display correctly, that and you also get weird font distortion and text misplacement just to name a few probs.
Honestly I used to love FoxIt but its back to the stock standard old Acrobat Reader for me till they fix it.
OR
Adobe Digital Editions is another reader that Adobe produce that makes reading them a breeze as well, and coming in at only 2.5mb its just as good, if not better than FoxIt.
Adobe Digital Editions Link:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions/
Why dont you people use the Cute writer for making PDF? That also is absoultely free. I am using Adobe also but the thing is that it does not support paper sizes bigger than A3 where as Cute writer can go any size. I like it very much and you can down load it at http://www.cutepdf.com (is that exact? if not pls do a google)
How that can be said as the PDF reader is only 1 MB? I found as this: 6.64 MB (6,971,392 bytes). So how is it possible to say 1 MB?
I use SumatraPDF! its even lighter ;)