Foxit Reader is a lightweight, small but free PDF document reader/viewer. It is incredibly small in size, lightening-fast to launch and rich in features. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7. In the past, you’ve had to download a huge PDF reader from another software company, go through a lengthy installation process and wait for an annoying splash window to disappear just to open a PDF document.
Adobe Reader is a real pain to use. It’s very large, bloated, and comes with features most users will never use in their lifetimes. However, Foxit PDF Reader 3.0 kills all the bloat and yet comes with some very useful features, such as multimedia support and content-sharing, while still allowing you to quickly access your PDFs.
Foxit Reader looks very similar to Adobe Reader, so users won’t have to change their reading habits and won’t have any problems in making the switch to the new software. Text readability offered by Foxit Reader is similar to Adobe Reader. Foxit Reader starts surprisingly fast when compared with Adobe Reader. Foxit Reader can also be made to work with your Internet browser, but you can find help on Foxit’s support forums. Foxit Reader opens PDF files from the Internet in their own Foxit window, instead of within the browser. Opening the browser to open PDFs is often problematic on computers with low system resources.
Earlier versions of Foxit Reader suffered from memory leaking issues. However, this has been corrected in the latest version. Other updates include fixing the hyperlink issue, added multimedia support, printing highlighted-only sections, and tabbed PDF browsing, which allows you to read multiple PDFs at the same time in the same window. Overall, unless you’re an Adobe fanatic Foxit Reader is what we recommend.