Surprisingly, it took me until today to hear about Adobe Reader Lite. I saw it on FreewareFiles, but obviously it has been around for a while. Seems to be very interesting, the author has removed some bloated features. :-TU
Some people say that you should never use lite versions of applications, like QuickTime Alternative, Real Alternative etc., according to security risks. I disagree, because authors of these lite versions are very quick to update to new versions, once vulnerabilities have been discovered in the main application. If you don’t even combine the applications with internet (like chose NOT to display PDF in browser), I can’t see any risks. Use the applications as stand alone, isolated from internet, and it should be fine.
I’m looking forward to try Adobe Reader Lite once my 3D scene has finished to render… which seems to take many, many hours. :-\ I will post again when I’ve tried Adobe Reader Lite 8.1.2, and see if the reviews I’ve seen are true: faster loading and many, many megabytes of saved disk space.
I got rid of Adobe reader because I found it too bloated, this is why I use Foxit reader, very similar to Adobe, but not as bloated and much faster for me.
There’s a little app. (no installation needed) that will ‘lighten’ Acroread. It does it by stopping all of the plugins from loading; this removes most of the functions and makes AR much like Foxit!
I use Foxit with Opera (in most cases I just look at a PDF then close Foxit, not saving the PDF) but my default reader is PDFXchange viewer. It has a couple of problems atm (nothing too serious and the one that might be bad can be bypassed by using Foxit), but it’s possible to add comments and type in to text boxes - very useful for annotating documents.
As I’ve stated in other threads, I can’t use Foxit because it does not properly render all features of the PDF format.
Now I’ve installed it, and it’s a huge difference! E.g. I remember that the full version saved all the installer files in a folder - extracted - which was about 90 MB. This is gone now. As for performance, Adobe Reader Lite loads just fractions of a second slower than Foxit, on my system. :-TU
I did try that little application I think giraffe refers to, but it destroyed my Adobe Reader setup so I won’t use it again. At least not with Adobe Reader Lite around.
So happy. (:LOV)
This software takes me closer to perfection, in terms of a non-bloated and fast system.
I really recommend Adobe Reader Lite for anyone who likes the speed of Foxit but find it bad in some way, e.g. due to PDF handling and GUI.
the PDF reader that I mentioned, PDF X-change Viewer, is available as a portable version.
@LA: how did the speed-up app. ‘break’ Acroread? I used to use it; just selected the things to turn off and they’re all reversible.
I’d give Acroread Lite a go, but PDF-X is OK for me and I like to be able to edit PDFs.
I’m afraid that I don’t remember any details, only that I installed it and I immediately had to remove it to get Adobe Reader running again. Maybe it was possible to tweak it, but since the out-of-the-box setting didn’t work, I didn’t bother to do any tweaking.
