Adobe Acrobat Reader is great. The Portable Document Format is a wonderful standard that’s always sharp and readable no matter what magnification. But the Reader is so slow! And all the updates! What a hassle. For years now, I’ve been recommending the Foxit PDF Reader when people just need a quick solution to open a PDF in an e-mail attachment for example.

It’s lightning fast and has all the pagination and magnification features we’ve come to expect from Acrobat, which used to be a light weight application. I recently needed more space on my primary hard drive and found that the Adobe Reader takes more space than the essential Photoshop application! As you can see, Foxit, which does most of the same basic things, is a drop in the bucket in terms of hard drive space next to the big Adobe Reader. Oh, and it’s free.

As of this article, Foxit 2.3 is available and according to the basic summary of what’s new:

Foxit Reader 2.3 is just released. The new version 2.3 includes a multimedia player feature allowing Foxit users to not only read PDFs, but to watch and listen to the audio/video elements coming with PDFs as well.