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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I missed some recent news, but what PDF viewer is pre-installed on Windows?

There was one in Windows 8 (Windows Reader) but it was removed in Windows 10. It is still available for free in the Windows Store.

Did they? Edge definitely still opens PDFs by default on Windows 10.

Did you upgrade from Windows 8 or install new? New installs of Windows 10 or upgrades from 7 won't have it installed.

I'm talking about Reader btw, which would be analogous to macOS's Preview. Edge is like Firefox with PDF.js.

Reader works better than PDF.js too.

In Windows 10, Reader was officially merged into Edge. The app that remains in the Windows Store will gently encourage you to use Edge instead. This seems part of the direction shift from simple task-focused apps (back) towards branded monolithic apps as Microsoft tries to find a healthy middle ground between good for mobile and convenient for old desktop users. (It's been a bigger deal of public concern with the Messaging/Phone/Skype apps back and forth shifts, but that hasn't been the only place this has been happening, as seen here with Reader, Reading List, and Edge.)

Yeah I was thinking of the one included in Windows 8, didn't know that they dropped it.

I remember that one. Before 8.1, it could not print PDFs. I have been struggling ever since to come up with an appropriate metaphor for how idiotic a PDF viewer without printing is.

Windows 8 tried to move all of printing into the Charms bar, which was a great idea in that something so common (so many apps need to print) would have one big place to nearly always find it, but of course was also a bad idea because learning the Charms required unlearning the idea that every app has its own Print button scattered somewhere possibly randomly in the app itself and learning the Charms instead.

So you could definitely print PDFs in Windows 8 from the Devices Charm. You'd just need to know that was what the Devices Charm was for.

(I thought the Charms were a good idea that Microsoft didn't quite know how to execute.)

Thanks for the explanation!

Having a single place for printing rather than one per application sounds like a nice idea indeed. If only they had documented it better... ;-)

In Windows 10, Microsoft Edge is used to view PDFs.

Which is another reason Mozilla needs to have a PDF viewer - it's a feature web browsers are simply expected to have these days.

OTOH, pdf.js is the first thing I disable in Firefox, since SumatraPDF and Atril render things much more quickly and lightly! :)

I can understand customer demand but I'd prefer if it was optional - e.g. the first time a user visits a PDF they're prompted to install a viewer if they so wish.

AFAIK Edge is the default PDF viewer in Windows 10.

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