Firefox introduces PDF viewer

Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by Watabou on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @01:20PM (#5252175)

On the mac, Firefox Nightly loads the PDF in a second while Google Chrome Dev loads in about three seconds. I can enter text in the pdf in Chrome while Firefox gives an annoying little "The pdf might not be rendered perfectly" error bar at the top.

Let's try Safari: Loads in under a second maybe even faster, super quick scrolling, ability to enter text and the option to download the pdf on the bottom. This is the way browsers should handle pdf. We are just not there yet. I don't want to use Safari though. Firefox is the browser for me.

I almost always download the pdf anyways and view it through Preview.app, especially if I want to actually input text in the pdf. I love Preview. It's like the best PDF reader out there. Preview is what liberated me from Acrobat. Well, switching to the Mac did that for me, really.

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by RandallBrown on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @02:43PM (#5252776)

PDF performance is great on the Mac because Apple's 2d drawing system is actually based on the PDF spec. You can even "print" to a pdf from just about any Mac application that supports printing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by esbwhat on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @02:52PM (#5252836)

just a note, but you can do that in linux and afaik windows as well

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by iso-8859-1 on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @06:25PM (#5254094)

on Windows, you can print to XPS out of the box, but not PDF.

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by jpxxx on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @01:50PM (#5252407)

To be sure, Safari is invoking a system level PDF reader to handle inline PDFs. That's what gets you that silky performance and nice rendering.

When you pop the PDF out, it then gets passed to the full Preview.app.

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by w0utert on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @02:52PM (#5252835)

>> To be sure, Safari is invoking a system level PDF reader to handle inline PDFs. That's what gets you that silky performance and nice rendering.

Which, IMO, is the way it should be, and not just for PDFs. I'm impressed by the fact that Mozilla implemented a capable PDF reader in JavaScript, but I won't be using it. Firefox and Chrome are both trying too hard to duplicate everything my OS already provides: their own video codecs, audio codecs, image codecs, the Flash plugin (Chrome), now a PDF viewer, and so on. I'd rather just have my browser render HTML/CSS, run JavaScript, and that's about it. It doesn't have to implement anything else itself, all modern OS's should have everything required to display all the embedded content.

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by rictic on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @06:02PM (#5253983)

The main problem I see with that is security. PDF is a huge attack surface, reducing that to the already existing and well tested javascript surface is a huge win. Ideally (in my mind) every browser will come to use Mozilla's pdf implementation.

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by jfb on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @06:38PM (#5254176)

Ideally, I would trust my OS vendor and be safe using their superior PDF renderer. I think my ideal world is likelier to come to pass than yours, sad to say.

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by rys on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @04:34PM (#5253517)

That only works if you don't care about fragmenting what features you support on multiple OSes, and trust those codes to do the right thing in all of your use cases for it.

For some of the browsers it's clearly better for them to bundle the kitchen sink, since at least it's their kitchen sink and guarantees the kitchen sink will always be there.

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by ___1___ on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @01:44PM (#5252351)

I don't have firefox and a pdf view won't change that. Your description of Safari matches that of Chromium on Arch Linux.

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by omaranto on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @02:27PM (#5252644)

I don't think that's right: I use Chromium on Arch Linux and it does not seem to have a PDF viewer. It always offers to download PDFs and open them with a separate program, often warning me first that PDFs from unknown sources can be dangerous.

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by Watabou on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @01:46PM (#5252378)

Does Chromium have a built in PDF reader? I thought google adds that in for Chrome along with Flash?

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Re:Firefox introduces PDF viewer by natex on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @02:34PM (#5252701)

It is not included, but can be installed. (libpdf)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Open_PDF_files...

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