For a while now, I have become increasingly annoyed with the wonderful ability of Acrobat 8 to start updating itself without even asking. And as far as I could tell, there is no setting to disable this feature. Once you leave Acrobat open for a few minutes, it starts downloading automatically. You have to stop the process yourself then. Another thing I don't like, although not particularly annoying, is that Acrobat loads a program into memory that makes the loading of PDF files faster.

So today I decided to look for an alternative. And I found a very suitable one. Foxit Reader. I knew of this piece of software for a while already, but somehow never really bothered to check it out. I guess desperation can drive you to try new things. First of all, the program comes in at under 3MB, compared to Acrobat's 20+MB. Secondly, Foxit does not load any extra processes into memory. I noted that despite this fact, PDF files still loaded at least as quickly as with Acrobat. And lastly, it looks like Foxit does not automatically start downloading without checking with anyone. So far so good. The Foxit Reader is also available for Linux.