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Comment by fdej | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, PDF.js is slow compared to native viewers and often renders documents incorrectly. And the project is five years old now. It's not bad as a fallback, but considering how important PDF files are, looking for a better solution makes sense.

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Agreed. As an OS X user, I hate it any time a browser or website uses something like PDF.js instead of the native PDF support. The native PDF support in OS X is fast and excellent.

> instead of the native PDF support

You mean instead of just downloading the file? Or does Preview support opening PDF links.

Safari will display PDFs natively without requiring you to download it to disk.

And on iOS too!

Care of QLPreviewController [1], something I wish Android had an equivalent for...

[1] https://developer.apple.com/reference/quicklook/qlpreviewcon...

And fully sandboxed on both macOS and iOS!

Preview does support opening PDF links.

PDF.js sole purpose is to be non native. I don't want to rely on native existence of a safe enough, fast enough PDF renderer. PDF.js provides just that.

Then they should make PDF.js faster! The way it uses a canvas could be significantly improved. I guess the point is that they don't want to invest the engineering resources to do that, which is a shame but I understand the reasoning.

My work machine is now completely Adobe-free. thanks to PDF.js. I hope they keep this project afloat.

While convienent, I can't see how anyone would want to use a browser-based PDF viewer over a native one.

Convenience is exactly it.

Have to admit I find it pretty damn useful myself, even though I believe PDFs to be completely out of scope of a web browser.

I really wish the format would disappear. Everybody says it's useful at being a "perfect digital representation of what things look like on paper", which is certainly super useful for printing. But I cannot understand how so much information that should simply be distributed in either HTML (forms), epub (ebooks) or jpg/png (scans and digital images) is distributed over PDF, a pain-in-the-arse, overengineered format whose readers are always extremely slow and riddled with security issues and from which it's extremely hard to extract source data.

There are a number of places where PDF has advantages that HTML, etc can't match. For forms, the PDF spec has electronic signatures, which means that you can sign legal documents without having to find a fax machine, or mail things back and forth. For print documents, it can do things like multiple column text in a sensible manner, across page breaks. As a general document format, it allows you to actually describe paper sizes, etc, so you can email someone a document that looks like it will when it's finalized. For archival, it means you can, without a bunch of hacks, create searchable documents of old, scanned in content. So things like electronics datasheets are searchable, and still retain the formatting of the originals. PDF continues to exist because there are so very many places that the alternatives are an even bigger pain in the ass, fix those, and then you can start to get rid of pdf.

All sensible uses of PDF (except your first one; electronic signatures are ridiculous, but let's not get into that).

I'm talking about where pdf is used and shouldn't be.

Would postscript classify as an "even bigger pain in the ass" with regards to pdf?

The only time I ever start a native PDF viewer is when I need to actually print it. Apart from those rare cases, to me a PDF is a web page, just worse, and I want it to live where all the web pages live on my computer, in a browser tab, with all the facilities the browser provides (history, tree style tabs, frictionless access to Google, etc etc).

I'm sure ymmv depending on what kind of PDFs you use and how often; I'm on the lower end.

I got tired of constantly updating due to vulnerabilities. I haven't had a PDF viewer installed for years, I have PDFs open in Firefox.

I got tired of having Adobe Updater constantly running in the background (why not a scheduled task run periodically like Google Updater?!) and the need to update/reboot my PC regularly when a new version of Acrobat came out.

I switched PDF viewers briefly but ended in the same update cycles I was in with Adobe.

PDF.js isn't perfect but I've yet to come across a PDF that it couldn't open for me. I use it mainly to view things like insurance bills or other random documents where pixel perfect rendering is irrelevant.

This is why package managers are so important for any OS. They shouldn't be updating independently.

Agreed. I use Firefox on OS X and I love pdf.js. I found it a huge hassle to get native PDF working on Firefox in the past, and with pdf.js I just don't have to worry about security. I've also not had much/any compatibility issues with pdfs. Bills, concert tickets, and specs all render acceptably. I will be very sad to see it go.

Nonsense. On windows I have used foxit for a long time and I never had all that shit that you are talking about. On Mac if anyone told me that they used happily a JavaScript PDF viewer instead of the built in viewer I would seriously worry for their mental health.

As a scientist, pdf.js is simply not capable enough for any serious work with pdf.

I would love to do as you say, and read pdfs in the browser only. From what I have learned in the context of this discussion, switching away from pdf.js will contribute to enabling that.

> As a scientist, pdf.js is simply not capable enough for any serious work with pdf.

As a counterpoint, I regularly read (CS) research papers in pdf.js and have never had any trouble. One of the reasons I stuck with Firefox is the superior Zotero integration.

Hmmm... pure math papers are often fine but I used to still see misformatted math relatively frequently, maybe I should give it another try.

I might be in the minority, but I really dislike reading PDFs on OS X's Preview while using the touchpad because of accidental horizontal scrolling. I do not understand why Apple decided to make the "rubberband" effect when clearly there's nothing to scroll on the left and right sides of the PDF. If anyone has a solution to prevent horizontal scrolling on OS X applications (Safari, Preview etc), please do share.