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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

I gave Firefox a chance as my PDF reader as it has a pretty efficient engine. But that didn't work out as I don't need to read PDFs often so every time it launched, it ran an update that added 10s to reading the PDF... :/

My current main browser across desktop and mobile is Brave. Pretty happy with it. Overall more efficient and with a better UI than FF. I've used FF for many years, but I feel it's simply not as good as competitors anymore.

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Enable background updates when Firefox is not running[1]. This way it will be ready to launch anytime.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-background-updat...

You will not beat SumatraPDF for speed of opening & reading PDF's.

If you're going to use a Chromium based browser, why pick one that's filled with crypto ads? I use Firefox on mobile because it supports extensions. One of the main benefits of the web is that, unlike proprietary native apps, I get to experience it the way I want. The web is nearly intolerable without extensions.

I’d recommend using a dedicated PDF reader in any case.

I use SumatraPDF for reading, but it doesn't do editing. The Firefox PDF editor works perfectly fine.

In latest pre-release it does editing too (annotations, filling out forms, extracting pages, deleting pages etc.)

One advantage of Firefox's PDF reader is that it is sandboxed which a dedicated PDF reader typically isn't AFAIK.

Generally speaking most dedicated PDF readers haven't implemented the nastier parts of the PDF spec that need a sandbox. Except adobe. They support everything because they wrote it. But they keep making it worse so I can't recommend them.

For Linux users, SELinux's sandbox command works well. (The manual isn't event two printed pages.)

I think flatpacks also have some sandboxing.

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/sandbox.8.html

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