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Get rid of the bloatware! The 1MB fully functional PDF Reader

Posted in Cool, Downloadable, Tech by Dan at 1:01 pm

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.

pdfreader_screen

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.

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60 Comments, Comment or Trackback

  1. Dean

    Been using that for a programm for easily a year or two.Its nice,really nice.

    Jul 19th, 2006

  2. Michael

    You can reach similar behavior by disabling unneeded plugins in the original adobe reader. You’ll get load times of under a second.

    Jul 19th, 2006

  3. Derek

    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.

    Jul 19th, 2006

  4. j2

    HELL. YES.

    Jul 19th, 2006

  5. Shakir

    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…

    Jul 19th, 2006

  6. sky

    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?

    Jul 19th, 2006

  7. sky

    scratch that- stupid question. got it figured out.

    Jul 19th, 2006

  8. Eddie

    sky, how did you figure it out? I am having the same problem.

    Jul 19th, 2006

  9. sky

    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-

    Jul 19th, 2006

  10. Jerry

    I have Acrobat so I can make PDF’s. Can I still use this w/o screwing them both up?

    Jul 19th, 2006

  11. Dan

    Yup Jerry!

    Jul 19th, 2006

  12. ikonQ

    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. ;)

    Jul 20th, 2006

  13. Alan

    Terrific! Great… That makes me happy

    Jul 20th, 2006

  14. random guy

    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

    Jul 20th, 2006

  15. Dan

    mjbdvkjb

    Jul 20th, 2006

  16. Bob

    Dude…

    Jul 20th, 2006

  17. Jeff

    Use this, http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator/ to create PDFs for FREE!

    Jul 20th, 2006

  18. James

    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

    Jul 20th, 2006

  19. Arun

    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

    Jul 20th, 2006

  20. James

    only because you know they are right lol. i suffer with windows btw :p

    Jul 20th, 2006

  21. LaVaca

    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?

    Jul 20th, 2006

  22. Sohil

    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

    Jul 20th, 2006

  23. virtualadrian

    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/

    Jul 20th, 2006

  24. XeroRestraint

    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.

    Jul 20th, 2006

  25. Oryx

    You are da man! Thank you for showing us this!

    Jul 20th, 2006

  26. subbu

    Its lightning fast .. In FF it loads the PDF in application and not in Browser itself . .Is there a browser plugin for this ?

    Jul 20th, 2006

  27. Jared

    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.

    Jul 20th, 2006

  28. matty_x

    What about gsview and ghostscript? Free as in speech and beer. Displays and prints PDFs.

    http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/

    Jul 20th, 2006

  29. Cruddy

    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.

    Jul 20th, 2006

  30. Des Traynor

    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 :)

    Jul 20th, 2006

  31. vo

    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.

    Jul 20th, 2006

  32. Ordinant

    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.

    Jul 20th, 2006

  33. RobT

    Last I checked, Adboe won’t let Microsoft ship integrated PDF functionality in its products…
    Adobe Threatens Microsoft

    Jul 20th, 2006

  34. Jonas Chen

    I’ve tried it. It’s good!

    Jul 21st, 2006

  35. 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.

    Jul 21st, 2006

  36. John

    “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.

    Jul 21st, 2006

  37. Dan

    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!

    Jul 21st, 2006

  38. Dean

    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.

    Jul 21st, 2006

  39. Jeepr

    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 ;)

    Jul 21st, 2006

  40. bkmondal

    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.

    Jul 21st, 2006

  41. Jason

    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?

    Jul 21st, 2006

  42. Clair Ching

    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.

    Jul 21st, 2006

  43. German Rumm

    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.

    Jul 21st, 2006

  44. powder

    So what about a pda reader????

    Jul 21st, 2006

  45. abhie

    Why spend $9.95 for a pdf publisher? check out pdfcreator, its free software under the GPL and it does an excellent job

    Jul 21st, 2006

  46. srotman

    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.

    Jul 21st, 2006

  47. Theo

    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..

    Jul 22nd, 2006

  48. justin

    Yes, adobe acrobat sucks the big one.

    Jul 25th, 2006

  49. Dave

    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).

    Jul 26th, 2006

  50. nick botulism

    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/

    Aug 1st, 2006

  51. Robert

    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.

    Aug 5th, 2006

  52. WastePotato

    Hey if you want to open PDF in Firefox use this!

    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/636/

    Aug 28th, 2006

  53. Claire

    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).

    Oct 9th, 2006

  54. Saul

    Seems there are loads of people here advertising their own wares.

    Oct 11th, 2006

  55. HD

    WTF is the deal with the Adobe Download Manager. Isn’t downloading a built-in feature of most web browsers?

    Nov 10th, 2006

  56. Tim King

    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/

    Jan 11th, 2007

  57. Jay

    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)

    Apr 27th, 2007

  58. Jayadevan

    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?

    May 2nd, 2007

  59. __ASMx86

    I use SumatraPDF! its even lighter ;)

    Apr 22nd, 2008

  1. Sifting through the latest software news and releases » Blog Archive » Foxit Reader 1.3 - Free Ultra-Lightweight PDF Reader - Dec 18th, 2006

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