Review Corner

Review: Foxit Reader (Alternative to Adobe PDF Reader)

By sheese - February 16, 2009 - 15:39 e

Foxit Reader – the Powerful Adobe Alternative!

The PDF format is still very much alive on the internet. In order to view PDF files the user must download software – usually this will be Adobe PDF Reader. This is the natural choice as Adobe is the official standard for PDFs.

However, many have criticised Adobe PDF Reader as being a bloated and slow piece of software which frequently causes browser instabilities and crashes. Why not try out something faster and more efficient for your viewing needs? Why not try out Foxit!

Foxit Reader is freeware and currently has over 50 million users worldwide. This number of users continues to rise, especially as Foxit recently released its third iteration. This comes with a new stylish design and integration with Firefox and other browsers. Let us now consider just what it is that makes Foxit a great PDF reader as we analyse its features and compare it with Adobe PDF Reader.

The first thing to note is that Foxit is comparatively a much smaller piece of software than Adobe. The complete Foxit Reader takes just seconds to download and is ten times smaller than Adobe – Foxit is 3.14 MB, Adobe is 33.5 MB.

Foxit launches fast. There is no splash window and the launch speed is significantly faster than Adobe, this should be reason enough to change to Foxit if you are someone who regularly views PDF files.

Foxit has several features to set itself even further apart from Adobe. There is an annotation tool to make adding comments and notes about the document you are viewing easy and there is a very useful text converter tool which converts the entire PDF file into a simple, plain text file. Adobe on the other hand leaves a lot to be desired. There appears to be only the bare minimum save/open functions which is to be expected with any software.

Overall it is clear that Foxit Reader is the superior choice to Adobe PDF Reader. Adobe is ten times the size with no more features. Just think of all that inefficient code left on your hard-drive, apparently doing nothing more than making your software slow and wasting your time. There is a pretty splash screen, is that worth the extra 30 MB? I think not.