'We're not only getting more downloads, but also more inquiries from large corporations who want to replace Adobe Reader for as many as hundreds of thousands of employees,' Bryant told Computerworld on Thursday.įor one, Foxit is talking to an unnamed American bank about replacing Adobe Reader for all 300,000 of its workers, as well all related Adobe tools, such as Adobe Acrobat, Bryant said. The latest version of Foxit Reader 3.0 for Windows is a svelte 3MB download, compared with Adobe Reader 9.1 for Windows, which tips the scales at 25MB.Īnd Foxit now has something else going for it: better security.įor the past year and a half, Adobe Reader has been plagued with numerous nasty bugs, including zero-day vulnerabilities that, if unleashed by an unwitting enterprise employee, could have devastating consequences.įacing criticism, Adobe is aiming to release security patches more quickly.īut it's not fast enough for many companies, says one anonymous security researcher at the Black Hat conference, who told CNET this week: 'As a result of the number of zero-day attacks on PDFs this year, large banks hate Adobe.'įirst released in 2004, Foxit Reader's downloads have been growing about 10% each month this year, to almost 4 million a month, says Erik Bryant, director of sales for Foxit Software.

Foxit Reader, a free PDF-reading knockoff of Adobe Systems Inc.'s free Adobe Reader, has won what its maker estimates is 70 million users worldwide because of its speed and light weight.

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