Foxit Is A Great PDF Reader

Until a few years ago I used Adobe Acrobat Reader to open Portable Document Format files, aka PDF files. Most people were and still are using Adobe to read PDF files. Have you ever wondered why Adobe Reader seems to take a long time to fully load your document, unless you allow the Adobe Reader Accelerator (or whatever they call it now) to reside in your startup folder? With every new release of Adobe Reader, the program is more bloated, and thus slower than its earlier versions.

Enter Foxit Reader, a great little reader with a slim size and small memory footprint. Foxit Reader quickly cranks up your PDFs so you can browse the file more efficiently. I have yet to run into a PDF that Foxit could not handle. My wife has used Adobe Reader for years, and has been content with the program. I pulled a sneaky on her a couple of years ago, and installed Foxit Reader on her PC. I did not uninstall Adobe because I wanted her to try Foxit and decide for herself which of the two she would continue to use. She was a little reluctant to try Foxit as she had always found Adobe very reliable. To make a short story even longer, she tried Foxit, and she liked it. She gave up Adobe Reader and has never looked back.

Let’s see, Foxit Reader is less bloated, faster, just as reliable and is as free as Adobe Reader, and oh yeah, I forgot, it is also more secure than Adobe. Now when someone claims a piece of software is more secure than another, that does not necessarily mean it is inherently more secure. Some programs are more secure simply because they are not targeted by people trying to compromise the security of your computer. Adobe Reader is a targeted application, and if you do not regularly update to the latest version of Adobe, you put your computer’s security at risk. Perhaps Foxit Reader will one day attract more attention from the bad guys, and become more of a security risk, but I will enjoy using it until that day arrives.

If you are interested in trying Foxit Reader, you can download it from their website:

Foxit Reader

One word of caution about “free” software. Never download “free” or for that matter, “paid for” software, without doing some homework. Do an internet search on the software in question to find out if it is what it claims to be. There are plenty of free programs available for download that are very good, some as good as the commercial ones. But there are also some that are rogue apps, and will give you and your computer a migraine. Check out the blog “Another Battle in the War for PC Security” about “System Security 2009” for example.

What about you? Do you use Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Foxit, or another PDF reader? What are your thoughts?