A free, fast-loading PDF viewer

PDFs are useful, and everywhere on the Web these days. Yet I hesitate to click on links to PDFs on the web because of what a production it is for Adobe Acrobat Reader to open. It lumbers into action like a sleepy elephant being awakened from a nap, first showing a splash screen, then eventually loading the program itself. I tend to think twice before even taking a peek at a PDF, because there's really no option to just take a peek - it's a serious time commitment!

But I just found out that there's an alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader for viewing PDFs, Foxit Reader 3.0 for Windows.

The best thing - well, I guess the best thing about it is that it's free. The second-best thing about Foxit is that it loads instantly. Those two features are enough for me. But it also allows you to draw graphics, highlight text, type text and make notes on a PDF document and then print out or save the annotated document. You can also convert the whole PDF document into a simple text file.

Foxit also advertises that it will not connect to the Internet without your explicit permission, which Adobe Acrobat Reader does.