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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

Their PDF replacement is far from good - buggy and unusable. We have to show PDF documents to our customers directly in browser, so we need good UX, and it was disappointing to see how it works in FF compared to other browsers with Reader and how much effort do we need to fix it. I'm not surprised they screwed up with Java too.

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It's disappointing that comments like the parent are getting downvoted here. Objective, factual observations should be encouraged, not censored.

The Reader "replacement" PDF viewer in Firefox is limited and buggy compared to the real thing. We also found it literally unusable for our purposes when it launched, and we routinely disable it on new installations where we still use Firefox at all (which is basically only test machines for web developers now anyway, because of exactly the recent attitude from Mozilla illustrated by this discussion).

It's an early version, and for many uses it's more stable and less intrusive than Reader.

I have avoided Reader for years by using Safari, and later Chrome, which each have their own built in PDF renderers. I'm glad that Firefox has caught up, it's one of the things that has kept me from using Firefox. I read a lot of PDFs, and loading the big, slow, clunky Reader plugin, or downloading the PDF, is a non-starter.

Since I replaced Adobe Reader with SumatraPDF on my Windows machine I found this to be a really good feature and it works for the most PDFs. In recent Firefox version I did not have any problems viewing PDFs. Although they need to make it more responsive, especially on larger documents. But Adobe Reader wasn't really fast to begin with, so it's not that big of a deal.

It works great for me, better than Chrome PDF Viewer. Chrome's viewer lacks even the most basic features like table of contents, and it's integrated pretty poorly -- it doesn't show the title of pdf (so PDFs are impossible to search by title in history), and it doesn't remember last reading position.

Works-for-me approach is good if you are choosing the solution for the systems you are administrating. If you have to deal with customer setups, things usually get much worse. The fact is that we've got degraded UX for our customers with one of the FF updates, because they are not IT professionals and they have chosen FF by someone's advice, not after competent analysis of different solutions.

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