- Quick specs
- Price: Free
- Operating system: Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000
- Date added: November 05, 2009
- Total Downloads: 4,046,315
- Downloads last week: 226,205
- See full specifications
- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 803 votes
See all user reviews -

CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: Seth Rosenblatt on December 08, 2008
To put it gently, Adobe Reader is a real pain in the hindquarters. It's monstrously large, slow to load, and includes many features most users will hardly ever need. Foxit PDF Reader 3.0 kills the bloat and throws in some useful features, such as multimedia support and content-sharing options, while still allowing you to quickly access your PDFs.
The interface mimics Adobe's, so you won't have to change your reading habits. In our test, the text readability was similar. The small program starts surprisingly fast compared with Adobe. You might need to fiddle a bit to get it to work with your Internet browser, but you can find help on Foxit's support forums. It's a nice touch that it opens PDFs from the Internet in their own Foxit window, instead of sucking resources from within the browser.
Foxit's biggest flaw in the old version was hogging memory and that has been corrected. Recent updates include fixing the hyperlink problem, multimedia support, printing highlighted-only sections, and tabbed PDF browsing, so you can read multiple PDFs simultaneously and with ease. Overall, unless you're tied to Adobe we strongly recommend this freeware competitor.
Publisher's description
From Foxit Software :Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer, with incredible small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7. In the past, you've had to download a huge PDF reader from another software company, go through a lengthy installation process and wait for an annoying splash window to disappear just to open a PDF document.
What's new in this version:
The latest release fixed the issue in Foxit Reader 3.1.2.1013, where the text in PDF documents could not be printed with specific printers.More popular Document Management Software downloads
- 226,205 downloads 1. Foxit Reader
- 94,360 downloads 2. Adobe Reader
- 7,245 downloads 3. PDF ReDirect
- 5,120 downloads 4. Sonic PDF Creator
- 4,475 downloads 5. 123PDFConverter PDF to Word Converter
- See all Document Management Software downloads
User reviews
- Average user rating: 4.3 stars out of 803 votes
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
-
Showing 5 of 40 user reviewsSee all 40 user reviews
This software version | All versions -
Version: Foxit Reader 3.1.3.1030
"Foxit reader is great forpdf files without headaches"
Pros: I sometimes have problems reading pdf files with adobe and Foxit reader comes to the rescue
Cons: I wish it would take care of some other files that I come across from time to time
Summary: It is a great app. whenever I have issues with adobe
-
Version: Foxit Reader 3.1.3.1030
Pros: Reads some files that Adobe won't.
Cons: None to report.
Summary: Easy to use.
-
Version: Foxit Reader 3.1.3.1030
"I like the program and I am not fond of Adobe."
Pros: Will download most pdf docs but there are some that won't download accurately but this is fairly rare.
Cons: Will not download all pdf docs.
-
Version: Foxit Reader 3.1.3.1030
Pros: Works better than Adobe.
Cons: Nothing to report
Summary: I switched to Foxit Reader when Windows Vista came out. All I got from Adobe was instability and no explanation. Foxit worked faster and reliably.
-
Version: Foxit Reader 3.1.3.1030
"Works as advertised. compact and fast"
Pros: Opens PDFs quickly
Cons: none that I can see
- See all 40 user reviews Write review
Submit your review
- See more CNET content tagged:
- Adobe Acrobat Reader,
- Adobe PDF,
- Adobe Systems Inc.,
- Foxit Reader,
- multimedia
Previous Versions:
