I recently read this humorous article about Adobe Acrobat 9 highlighting the bloat and slowness of the program.
I haven’t used Adobe in quite some time. Back in the way old days of Windows 95 Adobe didn’t run all that quick and I found some halfway decent open source alternatives. Then there was the whole Elcomsoft/Adobe/DMCA issue which prompted me to continue not using Reader and other popular Adobe products.
There is a way out. There are alternatives to the bloated, crapware infested, sluggish piece of um… software that Reader has become. I would encourage you to try out:
- Ghostscript – For the longest time I used this piece of GPL software. Not only can you read Postscript and PDF files but also author them.
- Foxit Reader – It’s not open source, and you may have to dig around on the website to find the free version. But it is quite lightweight and speedy.
- Sumatra PDF – Honestly I just heard of it. But I’ll be giving it a whirl shortly. This piece of software is also GPL and is the smallest of them all. It is a single stand-alone executable whose sole purpose is to view PDF files.
If you know of any other decent free alternatives feel free to let us know.