Have to download the file, then load it on the client. Not sure you can make it much faster.

If the pdfs were served by some of the megacaps who posts tons of papers (e.g. Google or Facebook) then it would be an order of magnitude faster. And said megacaps would end up spending peanuts relative to the value they get from arXiv.

It’s better that ArXiv stays not relying on Google, Fb or any other tech giant.

What I would like to see instead is first-party support for BitTorrent and magnet links.

An order of magnitude faster sounds unimportant. Is all the time spent by researchers sitting around waiting for 0.4s for a paper to download really an issue?

Compression algorithms supported by the browser.

PDFs are typically already compressed. They are essentially compressed postscript.

They probably could make it faster by rendering server-side a preview of sorts. I don't think that most papers are large enough for this to have a major impact unless you have a very slow connection.

Browsers are painfully slow at rendering PDF. Open them with your local reader.

Really? I found Chrome being much faster than Adobe Acrobat.

Either way, the speed of rendering never bothered me.

Evince FTW!

SumatraPDF on Windows is lightning fast with the kind of PDFs you get from the arXiv (true PDFs without heavy graphics). I don't know what is fast on Linux, but probably some MuPDF-based viewers are (the MuPDF PoC viewer is fast even on WSL).

zathura is superfast on Linux, can handle thousands of pages, and may be used under either MuPDF or poppler.

You might want to check out this site:

https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/

I wish they would integrate something like that directly.

They have https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/ in beta which has similar functionality.

Awesome, hadn’t seen that. I’m sure there will be a zillion edge cases where it won’t work properly for specific documents because of odd latex quirks.