Foxit Reader 3.0 released, now it's even easier to read PDF documents

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 15:38

Opinion and Analysis

As an alternative to Adobe Reader 9, which is extremely feature-rich but very bloated, the latest version 3.0 of Foxit Reader maintains is zippiness but adds some excellent new features.

Just by coincidence, on the very same day that fellow iTWire contributor David M Williams vented his spleen about Adobe Systems' applications trying to take over your system, see Why do Windows programs suck so freaking much? (and what can they learn from Linux) I decided to eliminate all Adobe software from mine!

Back in mid-August this year, I wrote about a major disappointment that I had with the new version of Adobe Reader that had just been released, see Major feature missing from Adobe Reader 9?

My point was that in going from Adobe Reader version 8 to version 9, they unilaterally decided to remove a feature that I relied upon all the time. Up to and including version 8, you could opt via a configuration setting to have all PDF documents open in a single instance of Adobe Reader.

By removing this option in Adobe Reader 9, they made it impossible to stop Reader windows from opening up all over your Windows desktop. In the discussion section for this article, an Adobe Systems representative said they had to do this because of some issue related to Windows Vista, which I regard as the lamest of excuses. (Shame, Adobe, shame.)

By that stage, I had come across the free Foxit Reader, and was pretty happy with that because not only did it allow multiple PDF documents to be opened in a single window (single instance of the FoxitReader.exe program), but it also supported tabs.

Using tabs to control which of various PDF documents you're viewing is far more convenient than the way that Adobe Reader (prior to version 9) allowed this to be done via the somewhat clumsier Windows menu.

I uninstalled Adobe Reader version 9 and reinstalled version 8, and left it that way for several months, but rarely every used it. Then I did a run of Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) release 1.0 which was made available a week or so ago, and it told me what I already knew, that Adobe Reader 8 was out of date (and therefore a potential security risk).

I'll be writing a review of Secunia PSI release 1.0 in a day or so, but as far as Adobe Reader 8 is concerned I decided the best way to eliminate that warning was to uninstall it.

I also uninstalled all other Adobe software, for reasons much like those explained by David Williams. I totally concur with him that Adobe and Apple are two prime example of vendors who write software that assumes you're only interested in their products and they don't care much about adding extra unwanted junk to your system.

A nice little surprise turned up a week or two ago.

PLEASE READ ON...