Sumatra PDF viewer - better than Adobe bloatware?

review from ClifNotes, Mar 2007, permalink PDF Tools

Why would you want to use something other than the default Adobe Reader to view PDF documents online? I can think of two reasons, size and security.

Size?
Do you want to download and install the 27.5MB Adobe reader or the slightly less than 1MB Sumatra reader? I guess that depends on what you need it to do. If you just want to see the PDF file, I'd say Sumatra is fine. It's also a portable application that you can copy to a floppy disk or USB thumb drive to run on any PC.

Security?
I see security update notices on the Adobe Reader so often that I tend to ignore them. That's not good. Who knows when the update you didn't get will bite you in the rear? Sumatra doesn't do anything except view the PDF. That makes it almost bullet-proof from a hacker's point of view. It's also an Open Source program which makes it even harder because so many people look at the code and offer their advice on making it even safer.

click to expand picture
Quote from the website
What is Sumatra PDF?

Sumatra PDF is a slim, free, open-source PDF viewer for Windows.
Why another PDF reader?

Sumatra has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features.

It's small and starts up very fast.

It's designed for portable use: it's just one file with no external dependencies so you can easily run it from external USB drive.

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/


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