So, I needed to view a PDF on a new machine today and, of course, I head over to Adobe to snag a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Adobe Reader, or whatever it’s called today. Version 7 is out now, unbeknownst to be me, and Adobe has apparently invented more reasons to increase its version number, system requirements, download size, memory usage, and decrease everything desired: speed, ease-of-use, and simplicity. And I still don’t use a single feature that I didn’t have in Acrobat 4. I haven’t been to Adobe’s campus, yet–is it right next to the freeway? Whatever the case, there’s got to be some seriously potent fumes running through their offices to explain the horrible trainwreck that Adobe Reader has become.

In my typical, ever-so-slightly dramatic fashion, I typed in “Adobe Reader is a bloated sack of crap” in Google and found a host of sympathizers and recommendations. A kind commenter on this post over at Rick Strahl’s blog pointed the world to a free PDF reader called Foxit Reader. Weighing in a whopping 1.6MB (compared to Adobe’s 20M–or 28MB depending on which option you select), Foxit Reader downloads in a blink of an eye and performs amazingly well. Suddenly, your Dual Core processor actually feels faster than your old Pentium 3 did with Acrobat Reader 5. Foxit is beating the pants off of Adobe with their own technology…badly. This is how is should be done, folks.