It’s no secret that Adobe Reader has turned into a big, bloated slowpoke. Of course, PDFs are a part of everyday business life, so what’s the alternative? Foxit Reader, a free PDF viewer that’s faster, smaller, and in some ways more versatile than its Adobe counterpart. Version 3.0 just dropped, bringing with it a wealth of new features and improvements. Among them:
- Attachment Panel Lists all the attached files in the PDF document, and provides a number of common options that helps users manage the attachments, such as opening, deleting and adding description to the attachments. Users can also change the security settings when opening an attachment in this panel.
- Thumbnail Panel Shows thumbnail images for each PDF page and allows users to quickly view relevant portions of a PDF file. Now users can navigate through PDFs with page thumbnails.
- Auto-scrolling with Middle Mouse Button In the Hand Tool reading mode, users can perform auto-scrolling by holding the middle mouse button/wheel mouse button down.
- Foxit OnDemand Content Management This new add-on enables users to organize, share and collaborate on documents and forms online. Users can upload from Foxit Reader or send documents with ease. Advanced features include workflow driven document sharing, revisions of documents, CollabRoom for group collaboration.
- Firefox Support With Firefox Plugin, users can view and work with PDF files loaded in Foxit Reader with Firefox web browser.
Good stuff! (I’m most stoked about the Firefox support: No more hopping out of Firefox to view PDFs!) And yet Foxit remains lean and mean (it’s a measly 3.7MB download). Foxit Reader 3.0 is compatible with all versions of Windows (Me and later). It’s free.
Okay, show of hands: Who already uses Foxit instead of Adobe Reader? I do.
