![]() ![]() (Note: if you do decide to try Foxit, make sure you do a “custom” install and untick a few boxes or you’ll end up with some unwanted, bundled junkware.) That’s like saying, “We don’t trust sending a paper bank statement because somebody could steal it out of your mailbox, so we want you to leave your back door open and we’ll drop by and leave your statement on your kitchen table.” So in order to secure your investment statements they require you to compromise your computer by installing the Adobe stuff. Their attitude seems to be that it’s insecure sending a complete PDF to you, so they instead send you a PDF file that’s nothing more than a “shell” with nothing in it, but when you open the PDF it’s programmed to pull data across the internet and build the PDF on your computer in real time. Unfortunately, some of the worst offenders seem to be financial companies, who you’d think would know better. She told me she was required to use Adobe Reader to file online–Foxit wouldn’t do. ![]() Where you’ll run into trouble, though, is with PDFs created by companies that insist on using that ability to run program code.įor instance, my daughter lives in Wisconsin and the State has everyone submit their tax returns online. Infected PDFs are one of the most common vectors for getting your computer infected, so I don’t allow anything Adobe on my computer unless it’s running in a VM or an alternate, multibooted partition.įoxit can read typical PDFs as well as Adobe or any of the other alternatives. I guess nobody at Adobe thought through the implications of allowing PDFs to run program code or how much the hackers would love that… uh… “feature”. That’s because AR can run program code embedded in the PDF, even though that makes it a security nightmare. It even sometimes makes printing them out a real problem.įoxit Reader doesn’t completely replace the full functionality of Adobe Reader. If only we could persuade people not to embed things like video and tables in PDFs in the first place. Unless you deal only with older and text-only (or will not need to search them) documents, Adobe has you by the ****s it seems unfortunately and is not letting up on introducing new features constantly, to keep alternates to it’s own PDF programs at bay. I eventually gave in and had to go back to Reader, despite all of it’s drawbacks. The other one that caused me problems was that PDFs that used the more advanced features of Adobe, like tables and even worse, were not supported in Foxit and the layout would be wrong, or even an error message saying it could not cope with parts of the documents. The biggest differences I found were that Foxit did not include OCR, so scanned documents could be searched for text and the text would never be found, even if you could see it there yourself. This was not true the last time I tried Foxit – But it could have changed since then of course. ![]() Yes, other Adobe products will continue to work as normal after Acrobat Reader is un-installed. Yes, Foxit Reader will do everything that Acrobat Reader does. No, it’s not hard to get rid of Acrobat Reader… just un-install it from within Control Panel > Programs and Features. ![]()
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