Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

So slow and CPU hog even on i7 systems, that I always configure my Firefox installations to save PDFs instead.

Ditto. It's too slow for almost every PDF I want to open. It's too slow for: docs with a lot of pictures, docs with a lot of vector graphics and docs with enough pages.

Thea architects I know have much bigger problems than me. For them it's: every document is way too slow. They would really like if they can put in their html pages the preference "any reader of linked PDF would prefer native code renderer, the content is guaranteed too demanding for js one." They can change the setting in their own browser but their potential clients will just lose the patience.

The other effect is that not only it's too slow, the vector graphics often looks wrong.

For me it's faster than the 32 bit Acrobat Reader plugin that hung the entire browser for 1-2 seconds every time I wanted to open a PDF with it.

Honestly? I only have 2x1.3GHz, but it loads damn fast for files <= 5MB. How large are the files that you open that make your browser inresponsive?

Most of the ones that have more than 10 pages, specially CS papers.

There might be something up with your install--- run away plugin? I read lots of journal articles in FF, many in the 15-30page range with figures, with no problem on an old dual-core iMac.

My install?! As I mentioned, in all computer systems I have access to.

I just get the spinning wheel effect, while the CPU usage scales all the way up, until the whole document is downloaded, processed and finally displayed.

Can you link us to one, so we can do independent tests with it, please?

For example the Modula-3 reference manual, 100 pages, when scrolling with the mouse, pages can take more than 1s to render on a i7 system.

With native readers, it is almost instantaneous.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-52.pdf

Unable to reproduce on a 2.6GHz Core i7. It's slower than the viewer in Chrome, to be sure, but not to the degree you describe.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0Ne3vac3uJuOTB0Y2owLVN3MzQ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com