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Comment by cemerick | Hacker News Reader

The state of PDF support in Firefox on OS X has me stuck at FF 3.6, and it doesn't look like that'll be changing for a while (unless I want to experiment with random xpi's and running FF 4+ in 32-bit mode, etc).

Until that's resolved, all the fancy CSS tweaks in the world won't mean a hoot.

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On OS X, there's possibly the best PDF viewer ever, in Preview. I'm curious why you'd want so strongly to avoid using it?

I prefer opening a PDF in a tab until I've had a chance to see if it's something I want to keep. With download-and-open-in-Preview I'm filling up my Downloaded Files folder with a lot of PDFs that I don't want to keep, and I'll have to delete them manually.

Indeed, I'm surprised this had to be said.

As a linux user I am surprised. When I download to open in my reader the pdfs go into /tmp. This is fine, because since /tmp is a ramfs it just goes away when I turn off my computer. If I want it I just save it to a permanent location.

Unlike m_eiman and cemerick, I regard dumping debris into my Downloads folder as a feature. I basically never clean it out; it's just a convenience place to keep stuff that I have a low probability of ever wanting again, auto-sorted by how likely I am to want it (most recent first, in other words). Since I almost never bother with more than the first few items in the stack display of Downloads, it didn't occur to me that cleaning it out might be a chore, or even desirable.

It's desirable when you're using a laptop with a 120GB SSD that for some reason fills up all the time :/

This is the way (download, open in preview, keep/delete) I prefer. It's just a matter of taste.

Whatever engine Apple is using to view PDFs in Preview, it doesn't always display PDFs correctly.

It's much faster than the bloated beast that is Acrobat, but I'd say about 20% of the documents I open in Preview have to be viewed in Acrobat to be usable, so I've just defaulted to avoiding Preview instead.

A good, fast PDF viewer in the browser would be far better than either of those options.

What kinds of PDFs are you opening? I find the failure rate in Preview is more like 0.5%, and it's generally related to annoying (Adobe proprietary?) form-related stuff.

Plus Preview can also do some very handy basic editing (cropping, adding/deleting/reordering pages, etc.), which I can only assume Adobe have left out to in order to up-sell you Acrobat.

FF or Chromium (or both) should embed MuPDF[1]. It is extremely fast, reasonably small, and renders very well.

1: http://mupdf.com/

It looks like Chromium doesn't have it but Google Chrome has a built in PDF viewer.

Right. Chrome uses a binary PDF reader plugin, there are no sources available. Open source projects like Chromium and Firefox require an open source reader. I think MuPDF would be a good choice.

Does MuPDF have any speed/performance/etc benefits over the plugin in Chrome? Are there any reasons to spend the time/effort to switched other then one is open source?

I wasn't talking about Chrome switching. MuPDF is an open source option for open source projects.

Chrome bundles a PDF renderer. (You won't find it in the open Chromium sources; it's by proprietary license from a third party.)

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/bringing-improved-pdf-suppo...

It's already sandboxed and pretty fast and light-weight, so I'm not sure the Chromium developers would put much work into a replacement.

Could you explain the problem you're referring to (or point me to a page that does)?

I'm currently running FF 3.6 on OS X. Getting regular announcements of 4.0, and thinking I'll install it sometime soon. I don't usually pay much attention to what features/problems the new version might have. So, what's up with this?

I tried upgrading to FF4 on OSX, and it was a disaster: crashing on me left, right, and center. I went back to FF3.6 in under a week of use. I suggest OSX users wait for some stability updates before upgrading.

Fx4 is nothing but stable for me. Do you perhaps have a number of extensions that could be causing the instability issues?

If PDFs are that important to you, why not just use the external PDF viewer of your choice?

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