If your choice leans to the first, look no further than PDF-XChange Viewer.
It is a PDF reader that perfectly strikes the balance between speed and features.
Features and Highlights
Find and Search
In essence, Find and Search are the same.
These two separate features are used to locate specific text.
What makes them different is how far they can look for the text and how the results are presented.
Find is intended to locate words or phrases within the currently opened PDF document.
Search is used to locate words or phrases in one or multiple PDF files at once.
It is even possible to perform searches in PDF files that are not being opened.
You have to browse through the menu since the highlighter is not displayed by default in the toolbar.
This is particularly helpful when you better highlight words consecutively.
This way you will be able to enable/kill the text highlighting mode only by pressing the assigned shortcut keys.
Arrows, shapes, callout, text box, sticky notes, stamps, etc.
For a PDF reader that have tons of features, PDF-XChange Viewer is unexpectedly lightweight.
