To many people are stuck using the feature-limited and resource hungry Adobe Reader for viewing .pdf files. Like ANYTHING in the digital world, there are alternatives, and often the alternatives to the "norm" are better in many ways and worth your effort to change your default way of doing things. That sentiment is of course my battle cry, so I hope it's viewed as helpful and endearingly "Matt," and not me being pretentious and rebellious without good reason.
Here are two ways of replacing Adobe Reader as your default .pdf viewer in Windows which are both easier and faster on your system than the bulky, often malware exploited Adobe Reader (Google search it, you'll find it getting hacked every few months or so).
The first option will take no extra software installation. This is done by using Chrome as your default viewer by just changing your system's default program setting for .pdf files.
The first option will take no extra software installation. This is done by using Chrome as your default viewer by just changing your system's default program setting for .pdf files.
The next is using a different desktop application if you don't want to overload your browser or want more features than just the viewing and zooming that you get with Chrome. My current favorite is a cross-platform application called Evince that has more standard features like thumbnail view sidebar, notes, highlights, and inverted colors to make the page black and the text white (one of my personal favorites). The reason I suggest it over Adobe, is it literally uses half the resources to run (or less).
Changing default program in Windows:
Windows Official Explaination (long way)
or just right click > Open With > Choose Default Program...
There are certainly a myriad of other options with various buffets of feature offerings. If you want to look into other ones, here is a good list from I Love Free Software, though not all of them run as lean as preferred.
(Here they both have the same 1 page .pdf open)
Changing default program in Windows:
Windows Official Explaination (long way)
or just right click > Open With > Choose Default Program...
There are certainly a myriad of other options with various buffets of feature offerings. If you want to look into other ones, here is a good list from I Love Free Software, though not all of them run as lean as preferred.
