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> if your browser auto-downloads the PDF then … you have a browser that can't itself show PDFs ….

Surely a browser that shows PDFs itself downloads them in order to do so? (I don't know for sure what was bothering anw, but I'm often on a limited data connection, and, whether the PDF is displayed in my browser or dropped in the download folder, it hits my data allowance the same.)

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If a 100K download is of great concern, it's probably best not to click any link on HN. There are pages that have style sheets bigger than that.

Of course it must be downloaded in order to display it. Obviously what I mean is that since they point out "auto-download" specifically I would think that they mean that it's saved to disk in your Downloads folder. Why this should be a problem somehow you'll have to ask them not me.

If they file size was the concern, they would have said so. There are a lot of web pages that weigh in at more bytes than this PDF these days with all of their images and scripts and god-knows-what.

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