Foxit Reader 2.3 Build 3309

To put it gently, Adobe Reader is a real pain in the hindquarters. It's monstrously large, slow to load, and includes many features most users will hardly ever need. Foxit PDF Reader 2.3 kills the bloat and throws in some neat features, such as annotation tools, while still allowing you to read PDF documents.

The interface mimics Adobe's, so you won't have to change your reading habits. In our test, the text readability wasn't much inferior to Acrobat's. The 2.6 MB program starts surprisingly fast compared to Acrobat. You might need to fiddle a bit to get it to work with your Internet browser, but you can find help on Foxit's support forums. It's a nice touch that it opens PDFs from the Internet in their own Foxit window, instead of sucking resources from within the browser.

Foxit's biggest flaw in the old version was hogging memory and that has been corrected. Recent updates include fixing the hyperlink problem, multimedia support, printing highlighted-only sections, and tabbed PDF browsing, so you can read multiple PDFs simultaneously and with ease. Overall, unless you're tied to Adobe we strongly recommend this freeware competitor.

Download.com Video: Foxit Reader