In my job as an network consultant I spend a lot of time reading technical documents from the internet, and a lot of those docs are published as PDF files. PDF in itself is a nice way to make sure your formatting stays the way you want it to when publishing a text, it widely used, and there’s lots of software that can export files as PDF.
To read a PDF file most people use the Adobe Reader software. This used to be a nice small download that did just one thing – display and print of PDF files. The reader have become bloatware with more and more useless junk added for every version released.
Right now Adobe reader is at version 7 something, a whopping 27MB download, it comes with a useless Yahoo Toolbar, and a crappy photo management application. It forces you to install a useless download module, and installs itself to always run in Windows, consuming resources on your PC. It takes longer to start up than Microsoft Word! It also crashes on one in ten files, locking up the web browser and forcing frustrating restarts when you least need them.
Acrobat reader sucks bigtime – and I’ve finally gotten rid of it!
The alternative is Foxit Reader, a free, small, no-bullshit, and robust PDF reader. It starts up in no time, and have never crashed on me once in the 8 weeks I’ve been using it.