I used to have Adobe Acrobat Reader on my laptop, to open and view PDF files with. But lately the program is getting rather bloated, with not much visible reason. After all, it still does the same things, with some new bells and whistles (and honestly I couldn't name one of those new featues to save my life).
The download for the latest version, version 9, was a whopping
41.1 MB. Wow, does it really need to be so big?
So I checked out older, and much smaller, versions on
Oldversion.com. They had an interesting little list:
* Acrobat Reader 2 (1.4 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 3 (3.9 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 4 (5.2 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 4.05 (5.5 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 5.0 (8.4 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 (8.6 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 5.1 (13.0 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 6.0 (15.9 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 6.01 (16.3 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 7.05 (31.5 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 7.07 (20.2 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 7.08 (20.3 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 7.0.9 (20.2 MB)
* Acrobat Reader 8.11 (22.3 MB)
Oops! Looks like you've really let yourself go there, darling!
But wait. Surely there are other options. Of course, I still want to be able to read, save and print PDFs, but I really don't need much more.
So I tried
Foxit reader. It's like Acrobat on Slimfast!
A download size of 3,65 MB, it installs easily, and it starts up much faster. I haven't been able to find any features missing yet.
Yep, looks like this one is on my harddisk to stay.
But don't take my word for it,
read some reviews if you're interested.