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Adobe's software is the industry standard

Don't you mean Adobe's file format (i.e. PDF)?
There are plenty of other programs which support it that are both more secure and less bloated than Acrobat. One that I recommend is Foxit.

or just use foxit http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

Perhaps you're looking for the eslick?

One such: Foxit Reader works quite well in Firefox.

Strikes me as odd it hasn't been mentioned already. I know, I know, it's beerwise "gratis" as opposed to [F]OSS, but a Windows user should tolerate it well ;)

I don't remember the last time Flash crashed my browser. Poorly written JavaScript takes down Firefox far more frequently for me.

The only thing that really gives me grief is Adobe Reader, but that's easily fixable by using the PDF Download add-on for Firefox or using a different PDF reader, like Foxit.

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/ much leaner and snappier than Acrobat

Both of those apps are Linux only, and most of us aren't going to toss our entire OS or load up a VM every time we simply want to view a PDF.

And as for the other poster who "worked for Adobe" and touted Acrobat VS Foxit security? Your link has a GRAND TOTAL of three vulnerabilities for the ENTIRE 3 series of Foxit. You have seen more vulnerabilities in adobe than that in the past 4 months.

If the choice is go to an OS where NONE of my hardware actually works(sorry but Linux supports less than 15% of my current gear) or stick with the huge amount of super bloated malware attracting Kitchen sink adding that is Adobe Reader I frankly just wouldn't allow PDFs just like I don't allow ActiveX. But thankfully there is Foxit so I don't have to make that choice. And I'm really really glad that linux works for you dude, but being a PC repairman I can tell you there is a LOT of us where it just don't. For us the solution needs to actually run on Windows, and not through the mess that is CygWin.

The website for the Foxit program, mentioned by several posters as an alternative to Reader, has, right on the home page, Flash! the best thing ever!

These companies don't see that we often simply want a simple app to do a simple job fast, cleanly, and with minimum bloat. Instead they try piling in the kitchen sink hoping that one of the bazillion functions they pile in there might make it the "must have" for "the next generation" or again whatever buzzword bingo you choose. Just look at all the crap Nero has piled into what was once a clean and easy burning app. That is why for myself, my customers, and my family I routinely install Foxit Reader [wikipedia.org] which simply renders PDFs quickly, with minimum fuss, updates itself by default, and is very light on resources and doesn't try to run 24/7 like Adobe. Unlike Adobe Foxit hasn't tried to add the kitchen sink. It just renders PDFs fast. Give me that over app bloat any day.

You think using Foxit will help you avoid security flaws? Check this out:

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/security.htm

Those are just the ones they found - Foxit isn't even a big target for black hat hackers. Once it is - the Foxit religion will lose faith and switch to something else I'm sure. It would actually be possible to write an exploit that exploits Foxit and Adobe Reader.

Having worked on Acrobat - I know that it is audited all the time by the security team there. You can do a ton of code reviews, and fix a lot of vulnerabilities quickly (which they did all the time actually - stuff you've never seen exploited because of this), but being that we are human stuff comes up. Like anyone who is a security target: it is a cat and mouse game at this point and until that happens to your product you'll probably never appreciate the problem.

I've been using Foxit Reader for some time on my aging laptop because of performance issues with Adobe Reader 9, and it works great.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

I didn't switch for the performance reasons, I switched because adobe insists on updating their pdf viewer like every other day.

Uuuhhhhh....I don't know where you get your info from, but Foxit updates itself just fine, has been for awhile. As you can see here it updates itself. Allow me to quote: "To select "Check for Updates", please go to Help > Check for Updates Now > click "Preferences" in the Foxit Reader Updates dialog box > select "Automatically check for Foxit updates". Please note that this option is selected by default."

I can say that I have been using the free version for years and for at least the past two versions it has been advising me of updates to the software. of course like most here I picked Foxit for the lack of bloat and quick startup, but having it update itself is just a nice bonus.

"Yesterday at RSA security conference, F-Secure's chief research officer recommended dropping Adobe Reader for viewing PDF files because of the huge amount of targeted attacks against it.

I used to use Adobe's PDF reader but while running Windows XP, I got a message prompting me to upgrade my Adobe reader to the latest.

I attempted to and the downloaded file was quite small. On completing the installation, I found out that I was stuck with a directory heavy at 200MB! Uninstalling the extras did not help matters.

Later on, I discovered Foxit Reader. I haven't looked back and I am not worried about Adobe misbehaving for I know the would not like Microsoft to gain any traction with their XPS format.

I've been using Foxit Reader for some time on my aging laptop because of performance issues with Adobe Reader 9, and it works great. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

It is not open, but for me is better. Foxit reader device. The battery duration is awesome and is not locked to any eBook vendor. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/overview.html

Foxit recently had a stack based buffer overflow that could lead to account exploitation. But the worst problem is that Foxit is proprietary software; uninspectable, unfixable by even the most technical user, and Foxit is unsharable to users "on mobile devices or embedded devices including cellular phones, PDA's, and all other handheld devices". Just like with Adobe's proprietary PDF reader, the secrecy means that there's no telling how many other security problems are waiting to be exploited with Foxit. As more problems are found you must wait for the proprietor to decide to fix the problem and distribute that fix. If the program spies on you (or allows others to do so) you can only turn that off if the proprietor decides to allow you to turn that off. Foxit is not a secure program because of the restrictions it imposes on the user regardless of its current or future implementation. Sumatra PDF overcomes all of these limitations and if you don't think something in it is secure, you are allowed to fix it yourself, hire someone to fix it for you, or ask someone for a fix and then share the improved version with anyone even commercially. Sumatra PDF is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

I've been using Foxit Reader for almost 2 years now.

• FoxIt
• Xpdf (win32 binaries available)
• Cool PDF Reader
• MuPDF
• Okular (win32 download)

(yes, there's a ton of good PDF freeware available now)

I know, I know, I just replied to myself, bad form. But I probably should've linked to the site for Foxit. Here's the download page.

But ya, worth a try at least, it is free.

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader_2/reader-interstitial.html

Or just make google open all your pdfs so that you aren't forced too even if its ugly its fast and secure.

why would anyone want to use Acrobat Reader when there is a free alternative that is way smaller, faster and better. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/

Here's another way to do it... dump Adobe's bloated reader (if you can get it uninstalled) and pick up Foxit. I find it much more useful and a lot faster to load.

Based on the FoxIt and Sumatra support forums, it appears you're correct. Of course, a quick read of the FoxIt forum tells me it has major problems with creating freakishly large print jobs and taking its sweet ole time even when printing a few simple pages. So neither is ready for primetime business use, and I still have to decide which anvil I'm going to drop on my foot come Monday morning.

Maybe this is a good time to try an alternative like Foxit?

I'm using a non-Adobe PDF reader: Foxit Reader. It's commercial and not open source, but the non-Pro version is free to use; it's functionally far superior to the open source ones that were mentioned at Slashdot recently. I really hope the OSS projects can reach the level of sophistication of Foxit, because it's really my baseline of minimum PDF-reader functionality. The first OSS reader that can duplicate Foxit's sophistication will get a new convert.

It often produces much smaller compressed files (typically about half the size of a PDF), and there are open source viewers for many platforms.
Refer to original article

It has plenty of support for annotations, OCR, internal links etc just like PDF
Refer to your own comment.

you can extract the parts and structure of a Djvu document in XML with command line tools and modify them easily.
Refer to this page
It's also very easy to cut a Djvu document into individual pages, which lets you publish big documents on websites so that use

Refer to PDF SaM

Last but not least, the Djview viewer renders pages much faster than Acrobat or Xpdf in my experience -
Refer to Foxit PDF for windows or linux (look for the link in a previous post of mine.

Oh, one advantage of PDF is that everyone else is currently using it, therefore you won't annoy people by making them download and install new programs to do something (read) that they can do with the software they have... only because you want to use an obscure format type.

p.s. All my word processing needs are filled with .PW files. Wha'da'ya' think?

Foxit is, however, nice... too bad it isn't multi-platform.

Well, in fact there is a version of Foxit available for Linux.

Sure, Adobe works, at a 33mb file size!
I prefer Foxit. IT is only 3.5 mb and it reads EVERY PDF file I throw at it. Even PDF Forms with text fill in areas!
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader_2/down_reader.htm
Plus it is faster at opening PDF files right in your browser! Adobe often freezes my browser.

You do not need a directory of PDF readers, just one good one!

Exactly.

Preview.app on OS X, or Foxit Software's Foxit Reader for Windows are both examples of lightweight PDF viewers that render pretty darn quick.

I'm sure there must be one for Linux, but hey, we all use the CLI there right? ;)

Foxit FTW

...and the 80 megs of bloat is also a dealbreaker.

Foxit FTW.

There are alternatives for Windows as well that are better than the "official" reader.

Specifically Sumatra PDF and Foxit Reader are alternative PDF readers for Windows.

They are both orders-of-magnitude faster than Adobe Acrobat. Part of the reason for this speed boost is that they don't implement the hundreds of plug-ins that Acrobat supports. But frankly for >99% of the PDFs you encounter, those additional plug-ins are not required. (In the rare case where a PDF needs one of those features, I guess you can load up Acrobat.)

In addition to a speed advantage, using an alternate PDF reader is probably more secure. Both because it is less well-known (fewer exploits tailored to it), and because they don't implement those hundreds of plug-ins (some of which enable certain kinds of code execution).

That's exactly why I switched to Foxit Reader.

Them: Adobe PDF Viewer.

Foxit is faster and smaller

You are so right about Adobe Acrobat.

For a stand-alone free PDF viewer take a look at Foxit.

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

It's fast and small, and does the job.

Step 1: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

Step 2: Set firefox to open PDFs outside of the browser(it's somewhere in the options, I don't remember)

You will never have to deal with Adobe's POS application again. =)

Foxit PDF reader is free for windows.

In regards to the PDF problem: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/ Sumatra PDF. Licensed under GPLv2. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php Foxit Reader. Not opensource, but does have forms support, among other things.

For media, I use http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ for DVDs, or Winamp for most everything else. All my mp3 players are USB Mass Storage, so I don't have to worry about special media management capabilities.

Use Foxit. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php Less of a hassle.

I'm actually surprised you're haing troubles with Flash and IE7 - I had the same issues, but with Firefox. It eventually got so bad I just stopped going to certain sites at all using Firefox, and since the IE8 beta came out I've been testing it heavily - while I won't claim it's un-crashable (though remarkably stable for an early beta) I've had no issues with Flash.

Silverlight seems to work fine on both, though I've only run across a few sites that use it.

As for Acrobat, are you talking the PDF creation tool or the reader? If it's the reader, try Foxit Reader from http://foxitsoftware.com/ . It loads much faster and doesn't require rebooting or anything ludicrous like that. Foxit also has PDF creation tools, but they aren't free downloads (they have trials available, however). I won't claim that Foxit and Adobe have perfect feature parity, but they're damn good and Foxit actually has a few nice features Adobe could stand to add.

Then why do you use it? For PDF reading theres Sumatra or Foxit. There are many photo editing suites. If you just use Elements then the Gimp should be plenty. And Flash is useless. So for your purposes, why bother with Adobe software at all?

I gave up using Adobe Reader a while back, after finding Foxit Reader, which despite a few small annoyances, is about a million times faster at startup and rendering. It has no browser plugin, but in this day and age I see that as a good thing (you *do* remember the Acrobat javascript vulnerability from last year, don't you? :)

Foxit Reader is absolutely the smallest and fastest PDF viewer available. You can get it for Windows or Linux.

the page layout (right vs left) is hardly a major issue when it concerns Foxit, a PDF -reader-. I can fully understand if you want it to work correctly for a PDF authoring app, so that it comes out the printer the way you see it on screen, but geeze.

It's like calling ThunderBird "beyond hope" because the thunderbird team appear to be unwilling to fix the folder rename issue on the Windows platform (renaming "Test" to "test" will tell you that it already exists. durrr. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92165 - July 2001. )

That said, next version (there's always a next version) of Foxit should have this implemented a la Adobe's Reader. If it is, then that's implemented a whole lot quicker than the aforementioned asinine TB bug ( http://www.foxitsoftware.com/bbs/archive/index.php/t-192.html - September 2005 ), although I agree that it should have been implemented in an afternoon's work (even done dirtily so by inserting a blank invisible page in the page array).

Acrobat? Foxit PDF Reader FTW!

Better yet, turn off Acrobat and use a better reader. I use Foxit

For those stuck on Windows, dump Acrobat and use Foxit's PDF software.

I finally stopped the "install new Adobe, spend minutes ripping out tons of useless, bloated plugins and turning off stupid options" routine after that last PDF vuln that Adobe's crap automatically trashed your machine over, but Foxit at least had the good sense to ask 'trash machine? y/n'.

It sounds like you are using Adobe's PDF tools.

Try Foxit: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

Much faster :)

Try a different reader like Foxit under Windows or Xpdf or Evince under Linux. Acrobat is getting bloated and slower with every release, but looking at how the folks at Adobe ruined Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) when they acquired it, that doesn't surprise me at all.

For windows, try Foxit reader. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php