Is there an alternative to Adobe Reader?

All of us have probably used Adobe Reader before. Its the most popular PDF reader and provides a browser plugin. Being the most popular, you can guess that its the most targeted for exploits. In addition, the program tends to be a resource hog and often will slow down your computer when you click a PDF link. Is there a possible alternative that not only reads PDF, but provides a browser version and is not slow?

Product Name: Foxit Reader
Publisher: Foxit Software
Version Reviewed: 3.0 Build 1817
Date Reviewed: June 26, 2009

Rating:
85
out of 100

Foxit Reader is a free download from their website. It has also recently won CNET Editors Choice April 2009. They also try to get you to buy the pro version from the website. The download is only about 3.5 MB. Compare that to Adobe Reader’s 16 MB Download.

Upon starting the installation, it opens with a splash then you just agree to the license and after clicking next, the window disappears and after just seconds, the installation is done. The installer will continue to offer you Ask Toolbar with extra Foxit Features and shortcuts to eBay.

See this slideshow for more details. Having trouble viewing it or want to view it in full screen? Click here (Picasa Web Albums).

The overall performance of Foxit Reader is much much faster than Adobe Reader. Clicking a PDF link in browsers no longer lags the whole browser. Very lightweight. Also adds some extra features like content sharing. However, there is one area I was not impressed about.

The following applies to Windows Vista and Windows 7:

You may wonder why the plugin version was not shown. Version 3.0 of Foxit claims to have a Mozilla plugin. However, when I tried it, it just instantly froze Firefox and then gave me a message that the “Server is Busy” and for me to Switch to or Retry. Both buttons did nothing and the server was clearly not busy. I then tried it on Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari and the same result happened, only without the error message. Google Chrome offered to stop the plugin. I had to end process to all the browsers to close it. Looking at the Foxit Forums and some Download.com reviews, it looks like I’m not the only one with this issue.

On my Windows Vista machine, the plugin had the issue shown above. On Windows 7, the issue occured too however after Firefox restarted and restored tabs, the PDF actaully loaded but lagged a lot. That only happened once. The rest of the tries it just didn’t work.

The plugin works perfectly on Windows XP however. I tested this on Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.5, and Google Chrome 2.0. All works fine.

Workaround for Vista/7 Mozilla Firefox Users:

In Firefox, there is a workaround available, which is basically not using the plugin and have PDFs open the whole program. Go to Tools –> Options –> Applications . Then scroll down to PDF Document or Foxit Reader Document (or whatever your PDF files are named). Then on the menu, click on Foxit Reader – Best Reader for Everyday Use. Now, everytime you click a PDF link, it will open PDFs in Foxit Reader and ignore the plugin.

Verdict:

If you run Windows XP or earlier, you should definitely consider using Foxit Reader for PDFs.

If you run Windows Vista or Windows 7: If you are a user of Internet Explorer or other ActiveX based browsers, Foxit Reader is the superior alternative to Adobe Reader. However, if you use the majority of browsers, which are plugin based, like Firefox or Opera, you might want to wait until this plugin is fixed. Or if you don’t mind not using a browser plugin, you can have Firefox open PDFs in Foxit Reader rather than trying to use the defective plugin.

Hows the plugin working for you?

Foxit Reader Download Sites:

Official Foxit Software Site
CNET Download.com

Technorati Tags: Foxit Reader,Review,PDF

Firefox 3.5 RC 3 Available

The third release candidate of the long anticipated Firefox 3.5 is now available. Its probably a bug fix release as the release notes does not work and/or have not been made. Clicking the Release Notes link under download links you to Mozilla’s 404 Error Page. You can use the Firefox 3.5 Release Notes for now.

To update, you can use the Check for Updates in the Help menu (if you are on an administrator user account or running Firefox under admin) or you can download the latest version from the Firefox Pre-Release Download Site.

Firefox Pre-Release Download Site (Mozilla)

Technorati Tags: Mozilla,Firefox,RC,Release,Candidate

Microsoft Security Essentials Beta (First Looks)

Its been in the news since November, but its finally here. The public beta of Microsoft’s new free security offering, known as Microsoft Security Essentials, Codename Morro. It is intended to replace Windows Live OneCare.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free security offering that’s intended to replace Windows Defender and Windows Live OneCare. It offers real time protection and both antivirus and antispyware. Therefore, as you can guess, it was at very high demand.

It was released this morning as limited public beta to the first 75,000 people. I was able to grab a copy just a few minutes ago and install it on my Windows 7 RC system. The servers were extremely slow probably because of demand and the very small 4.7 MB download went no higher than 10 KB/s. To get it, you need to sign into Microsoft Connect with your Windows Live ID, then answer a quick survey. "This beta is available only to customers in the United States, Israel (English only), People’s Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only)" according to the beta site.

View details in this flash slideshow. Having trouble viewing it? Click here to view the full album (Picasa Web Albums).

Overall, this is an excellent new product and is likely to trigger some competition with the other free security products like AVG. It is based off of Windows Live OneCare, which has a reputation of having low false positives and strong new detection rates.

Being free and very light is already amazing. The scan took no more than 4.6 MB of RAM. However, I noticed that a SYSTEM process taking up almost 30-50 MB of RAM was always running and this was part of the program’s services. When I ended this process, Security Essentials gave an alert that the service was stopped. The process is MsMpEng.exe which is called AntiMalware Service Executable. In task manager, you need to show processes from all users to see this. The program overall is very resource friendly compared to other security products.

Update 6/26: I ran a full scan of my system (including both operating system partitions) and it scanned well over 2 million items and took 3.5 hours. If I recall correctly, my Windows Defender scan I ran in December 2008 when I only had one operating system took longer than that to scan around 600,000 items. In my experiences with MSE, it is faster than Defender.

The product, especially the About Window and the Settings tab looks very much like Windows Defender (Windows 7 version).

Overall, I’m very impressed by this new product. It would be nice however if they would bring back the Software Explorer from Windows Defender for XP and Vista.

My computer was not infected so I didn’t get a chance to test out the removal. While this is a great new product, I cannot place any recommendations just yet as there has not been any thorough testing for this beta product just yet for factors such as detection rates. It is likely to be similar to Windows Live OneCare, but there are no guarantees. However, I believe that this could be a great new product that could trigger some competition.

MSE also updates like Defender. Definitions are received through Windows Update. If will also disable Windows Defender after installing. You could turn it back on if you want but there isn't much benefit to that since both probably use the same engine. You could turn it on just to use Software Explorer if you are using XP or Vista, then turn if back off so your system performance won't be affected much.

Want to try it for yourself?

Microsoft Security Essentials

Keep in mind that this is BETA software.

Update 6/24: One day after the beta release, the 75,000 download cap has been reached and Microsoft is no longer accepting any more new downloads.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Security,Essentials,Morro

Firefox 3.5 RC Update Pushed to Beta/Preview Testers

The long anticipated update to Mozilla Firefox updates again. :) If you have been using Firefox 3.5 recently like me, you can receive

From the Beta Download site, you can download Firefox 3.5 Beta 4. But from there, pressing the Check for Updates button would update your Firefox to a version known as 3.5b99, which is a preview version, between beta and RC.

Just today, another update has been pushed out. This one happens to be the Release Candidate.

From CNET:
"Because of the 800,000 or so testers that Mozilla says have been using the beta versions, Firefox director Mike Beltzner said that he expects this to be the sole release candidate before version 3.5 goes public at the end of June"

That is certainly great news. More than one year after Firefox 3.0, the what was supposed to be a minor update 3.1 released in December is now 3.5 and contains many new features.

There aren't really any noticable changes between the beta/preview and the RC. Just expect it to be more stable.

Here is an excerpt from CNET:
"The upgrades to Firefox 3.5 have been well-documented by now. Private browsing, geolocation, faster performance than Firefox 3 for both loading pages and running JavaScript, local storage for better offline support, and native video for Ogg/Vorbis. If you're running the release candidate or one of its beta predecessors, you can check out Daily Motion to see how the non-Flash based video playback performs.

More improvements include support for HTML5 tags such as < video > and < audio >, native JSON support, support for Web workers so browser-based apps can run in the background, support for CSS and SVG standards, the ability to erase browsing traces by site or by time, personas for easier theme management, and downloadable fonts. The release candidate is also available in more than 70 language localizations."

Theres a nice new shiny Firefox logo too.


Learn more at CNET and Mozilla Developer site.

Note: In Firefox 3.5 RC, it doesn't seem to actually say RC anywhere except the welcome page. The About window just shows 3.5.

Update 6/19: Firefox 3.5 RC 2 is now available for download here. Fixes a few bugs and stability issues found in RC 1.

Linux MultiMedia Studio: Free FL Studio Alternative?

Familiar with FL (FruityLoops) Studio? This popular professional commercial program is used to create music as well as create remixes. From their website, they offer a demo version which actaully has full functionality…. except for the fact that the save project (as FLP-Fruity Loops Project) is disabled. Therefore, unless you finish the whole thing, then export the project into a music file and never intend to work on it again, you would have to buy the program. While this might be okay, are there free programs that might come close?

Linux MultiMedia Studio (LMMS)
Designed for Linux. For Windows (Windows 98SE and higher) and Linux. Free and Open Source.

This free and open source project is currently in beta stage, therefore, it does not come without bugs. Some of the obvious bugs are the fact that the play button often becomes a pause button. However, overall, the program works great!

It even supports VST Plugins (used by FL Studio) and FLP (FL Studio Project Files)! Works and looks quite like FL Studio. If you’re familiar with FL Studio, you should have no trouble getting used to LMMS (or vice versa).

The interface feels a bit cluttered depending on your screen resolution. This screenshot shows how it looks playing one of the preset samples. It supports .ogg, .wav, and .mid media files. Unfortunately, there is no .mp3 support at all right now. You can also import .flp files. You can learn more about how to use this program at their Documentation here.

Basically, you can drag the media files into the Song or Beat Editor. In the song editor, each part can be a series of notes. Double click on the part then you will be a large grid with a keyboard on the side. Clicking on the grid adds that certain note. You can also use their collection of beat, drums, and much much more. Full detailed guides can be found at their Documentation.

Don’t worry, it may seem very confusing at first. But once you use it for a while, you’ll get used to it and even have fun making your own music. You can even share your songs with the world.

This program is new and is in beta. It is quite strong and a possible alternative to FL Studio. The program could become a very successful open source project.

It doesn’t cosume much system resources when its idle. CPU Usage depends on the number of tracks you have on the song. When I tested it, it consumed around 150 MB of RAM.

Click here to learn more and download Linux MultiMedia Studio (LMMS)

Technorati Tags: Linux,MultiMedia,Studio,FL,Wintechpedia