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You also lose text select (and thus copy+paste)

But you can approximately restore that if you use Project Naptha as well... urgh... please nobody do this.

We realize that the text layer is sometimes a performance problem. We pushed already a lot of improvements to it and there is more too come.

Not your all's fault...the nature of the beast is that a PDF, in the pathological case, could result in thousands and thousands of individually-styled DOM elements per page, right?

Not much to be done in that case.

Is it easy to do that?

Memory suggests yes (I think it's just a render param you pass in or something?) but I'll need to check old code tonight to give you a definitive answer.

Yes, you can build you own personalized extension for Firefox, Chrome or Opera from PDF.js source code, which will disable text layer. (see also #textLayer=off feature at https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/wiki/Debugging-pdf.js#url-...)