Downloading a separate file and then launching an external application is obnoxious, particularly when it creates a new window. I know a lot of people who acti

Downloading a separate file and then launching an external application is obnoxious, particularly when it creates a new window. I know a lot of people who actively avoid and refuse to click on PDF links for that reason. I've always thought that the best solution would be for browsers to just include PDF rendering support alongside HTML. PDF is a popular enough format on the web that it should really be handled by the browser as a core feature, not by some add-on or external application. I really liked Apple's Safari for this reason (although I dumped it for Firefox because of AdBlockPlus). Done right it would seem like perhaps some of the higher-level rendering layers of the browser could be reused, regardless of whether the underlying content was PDF or HTML. (In fact isn't this how Safari works, with Quartz?) No offense to Scribd, but I'd like to see the need for their service go away by in-browser support for progressively-downloaded PDFs.