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Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

I think Firefox has been shipping with this for awhile to view PDFs. It may be an about:config value you have to turn on though.

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I only noticed it in FF15, but it may have been there for longer. Change pdfjs.disabled to false in about:config (followed by a browser restart) if you want to turn it on. Here's a test file[0] should you wish to test it out.

I've been using pdf.js for a while on my Windows box (where it is enabled by default on the FF beta channel) and it has performed remarkably well. Sometimes it's a bit slower than Adobe Reader or messes up colour or formatting, but on the whole I've quite enjoyed using it.

[0]: https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-des...

Note that the text in [0] doesn't scale properly, and the page previews in the navigation pane just show garbled text. Usable, but only just.

Sweet! (It voids the non-existent FF warranty though...)

What's better is, it allows the (awesome) extension Pentadactyl to click the buttons in the viewer (since it's part of the browser). Have to click on (or tab to?) to the document itself though, in order to be able to use keyboard navigation on it though :-/

I've been using it for a few weeks now, and have noticed that it:

- renders very well

- is extremely slow on large documents with images, but pretty good with text-only ones

- offers a more integrated experience than Adobe's plugin

I think it's very promising, and I look forward to seeing it become more polished.

It is included, but off in release versions at the moment.

In about:config :

name: pdfjs.disabled status: default type: boolean value: false

I'm no usability expert, but to me it would make more sense to name that parameter "pdfjs.enabled" true/false

about:config isn't really optimized for usability and there's some advantage to the double negative in that the absence of a value could be treated as a false boolean value.

So if at one point pdfjs should be enabled by default, they can just get rid of the preference in the default preferences file altogether instead of having to ship one where it says enabled: true (because absence of the value would be treated as false)

Does that mean I can just remove the Firefox extension installed from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pdfjs/ and then turn on this setting will enable a built-in PDF viewer?

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