You can find out more about this release by visiting the What's New in Foxit Reader 3 page.

It features a Firefox plug-in, the ability to play and edit multimedia files, the ability to display a document's contents as plain text, better control over the layout of the toolbar, the ability to control your reading throughout a PDF document using page thumbnails, and more. Note that some of the features are available only with the paid version, which is fair enough.

The basic reason I use Foxit Reader is for the tabbing support, and it's still there -- Adobe Reader, eat your heart out, you really should have this capability in your free version too because it is such a major productivity feature.

Apart from that, Foxit Reader is still a much smaller download and faster install than the feature-bloated Adobe Reader. I would now only consider using the latter if I were in an environment where I used other Adobe products, and really need to use the extra features in Adobe Reader.

However, I don't need PDF editing capabilities. I use OpenOffice 3 for editing PDF documents and then saving them in PDF format, which works just fine.

While Foxit Reader is excellent for opening multiple PDF documents in a single tabbed window, this is not to say that its tabbing support is perfect yet.

For example, it could really benefit from the ability (as in most recent browser versions) to shift tabbed windows around by dragging on the tab and dropping it in a new location, thereby keeping tabs with similar, related content close together (good for research purposes). It would be very nice, again like in many current browser versions, to be able to  double-click on a tab to close it.

Here's an example of just one usability improvement (perhaps made because I suggested it, though there could have been others who did). When you have more than about foru or five PDF files open at once, as I often do, you cannot see all the tabs at once. In Foxit Reader 2, you had to use a two-way arrow button mechanism displayed on the right-hand end of the tab bar to scroll the tabs horizontally, which I found to be a clumsy process (plus, the scrolling speed was rather slow).

In Foxit Reader 3, this has been changed so that there's a left-pointing button at the left end of the tab bar to scroll left (see "1" in the illustration) and a right-pointing triangle at the right end of the tab bar to scroll right (see "2" in the illustration). As well as that, the scrolling speed is faster, or at least seems to me to be. Together, this makes a much more natural and responsive feel for scrolling the tabs. Foxit Software seems to be very responsive to make small but useful improvements (compared with that other PDF reader vendor).

What I'm still missing is the ability to configure multiple rows of tabs (again, a common feature in recent web browser versions). This enables you to have many more tabs open at once and switch more easily between them.

A bigger concern is that you are still limited to being able to recall no more than ten previously-opened PDF files. As a "power user" I look at dozens of PDF documents every week, and find this to be a very severe limitation since it's not at all convenient to have to hunt around for files earlier than the last ten.

Finally, there should be the ability to add "dog ears" or "placeholders" within a PDF document, so that when you open that document again you can easily go to the same spot(s) again. By the way, I would have used the term "bookmarks" for this capability, but this tem is used (as it is in Adobe Reader) to describe the ability to display thumbnail images of all the pages in the document so as to jump quickly around (see "3" in the illustration).

Foxit Reader is even nicer to use with version 3.0, and I recommend it to you.