Kiosk vs StarForce Reader

Kiosk is a free, open-source PDF reader for web, desktop, mobile, and browser extensions. It renders PDFs and offers full-text search with highlighted results, page thumbnails, zoom, and light, dark, and night display modes. Its Chrome extension adds highlighting, underlining, strikethrough, drawing, shapes, and text annotations. The project says PDFs stay on the device, with no telemetry, cloud processing, or account requirement. Android works offline after installation, and the extension release notes also state that offline use is supported. The web app can run locally or be deployed through GitHub Pages as a self-hosted instance. Desktop apps can open PDFs directly and associate Kiosk with PDF files; the extension can intercept PDFs opened in Chrome. The extension supports Chrome 88+, Edge 88+, and Brave, but not Firefox or Safari. The project is released under the MIT License. Its Android release is an early alpha, and the macOS app is ad-hoc signed but not notarized, so Gatekeeper may warn on first launch.

StarForce Reader is a free application for viewing PDF, EPUB, SFPDF and PCDOC files; on mobile devices it can also play protected videos. Its reading tools include tabs, searches for text and titles, and a saved last reading position, along with activation and deactivation controls for protected documents. Downloads are listed for Windows, Linux, RED OS, macOS, Android and iOS. On Windows, the first opening of a protected document activates it and ties it to that computer’s software and hardware setup. Whether printing is possible depends on the publisher’s settings, and moving an activation to another computer may be disabled. On Android, removing the app also removes the protected-document license, so another activation is needed after reinstalling to view that document. The maker describes installation as free of promoted third-party utilities. For support, StarForce provides a feedback form and recommends SF Helper to help diagnose problems with protected applications. Its maker, Protection Technology, LLC, says it has developed software solutions since 2000.