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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Cool feature, although I note with some irony that once I have the PDF downloaded, I still have to then use Google's Drive PDF reader or some other tool to open it.

Maybe work on a full stack PDF renderer like the desktop version has, Mozilla?

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This is in the works. It's the same codebase as the desktop version, which is written in js.

I've tested it on low end Android phones from 2017, it works well, when compared to the native offering, and also on modern high end phones, it also works well of course.

What's missing is mobile specific UX, such as pinch-to-zoom, and UX/UI refinements, so it's nice to use.

It has form support, annotations and other goodies like the desktop version as well, which I find very useful.

about:config in Firefox for Android Nightly,pdfjs.disabled to false to give it a go.

> This is in the works.

Nice! Will it be exposed system-wide so that I can open PDFs from within any other app in Firefox?

This sounds pretty cool! I tried enabling it in Fennec (F-Droid "debloated" version with about:config available) and couldn't get it to work. It still downloads PDFs and prompts the system app picker for the viewer.

Did you have to enable anything else?

They already have a pdf reader they could add with ease https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

I don't know what their priorities are but this is the extension I use on firefox mobile so that it can do what safari has been able to do since like ios 3 (open pdf's in the browser). You have to add it to a custom addon collection, which I think you can only enable in beta or nightly: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/android-pdf-j...

> I don't know what their priorities are

When I used Android, I was never bothered that PDFs opened in the PDF viewer. I was pretty much fine with it. The PDF viewer (not from Google, an open source app) worked pretty much like iBook with a library function, so it was convenient like this actually. It does not look like something to be fixed with high priority. Looks more like a nice to have to me. Why does it matter that they are shown in the browser?

Put simply: PDF content is common enough on the web that it should be viewable as a webpage without having to jump out of the browser app. It breaks the user experience and for searches that may return many pdf results, the minor hassle becomes a major impairment (having to jump between two apps now). It is the case for all desktop browsers for many years now and ios that they open in browser first, so why should it be any different for Android?

I see the utility in you having an external app to view your pdf's (especially longform books in pdf would be best opened in a dedicated ebook reader app), but there is no consistent user experience on Android, each vendor has their own bundled apps, and some may not even bundle their own app.

What do you mean "have to"? Why not use one of the plenty ope source PDF viewers for Android?

Because for a dead simple read-only PDF viewer, I trust Google's security team over random Play Store app to properly sandbox the PDF and not let it do shady shit to my phone upon opening.

I'd trust Firefox more if they provided one, but in their absence, Google has the talent and the resources to do it properly.

Doesn't it mean the PDF file gets uploaded to Google drive then ?

No there's a local viewer

It does not. It is just a name. The file stays on the device and is not uploaded to Google Drive.

Samsung phones open PDFs in their Notes app. Besides that, I think most people just install Adobe Reader because it's what they know.

I'd expect googles pdf viewer to be comparable to others using well established libraries, such as poppler and mupdf.

The ones on f-droid are each horrible in its own specific way - some don't support scrolling, some don't support pinch-to-zoom, some have UX from 2012, some don't allow you to save the file (how am I supposed to save a bank statement then?).

I quite like MuPDF. For ages its UI was small but dated; it looks less dated now. That said, I don't remember there being a save button...

Currently, most of the PDF viewers from f-droid report they have a security vulnerability and the f-droid app recommends uninstalling them. For example:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/

No explanation on what the vulnerability is.

According to the forum discussion [1] you can find the explanations (when they're not included in the app description) in the MaintainerNotes part of the metadata file, which is linked from the page that lists all vulnerable apps [2] and as "Build Metadata" on the page you linked. Not very obvious, but at least the info is available somewhere.

[1] https://forum.f-droid.org/t/vulnerability-warnings-in-f-droi...

[2] https://monitor.f-droid.org/anti-feature/KnownVuln

No idea why people are complaining about the pdf readers in f-droid.

The MuPDF android versions are great, and KOReader is the best ebook and pdf reader I've ever used.

Maybe other people have other use cases, but the above work really well, and don't have known security vulnerabilities (since another commend complained about that).

Isn't Firefox open source? I mean, maybe fork a repo and code that? Or encourage/sponsor those who will?

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