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"Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer." Neat. I loathe every time I have to install Adobe Reader for something. Unfortunately, all browsers
by ocdtrekkie 6y ago
"Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer."
Neat. I loathe every time I have to install Adobe Reader for something. Unfortunately, all browsers PDF support for things like form filling and stuff tends to be pretty lacking.
- rrll22 6y agoSee https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/i2xom1/firefox_81_pdf_reader_gets_form_filling/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/i2xom1/firefox_81_...
- Darmody 6y agoI love that. I don't need anything else besides Evince to read PDF but in order to fill forms I always had to use online tools.
- wlesieutre 6y agoGreat news. Windows used to come with Reader for this, but Microsoft killed it and said "Edge is the PDF viewer now." Rather annoying to have the wrong web browser launching itself to view PDFs when Firefox does perfectly well at displaying them.
- Emanation 6y agoEdge pdf viewer is a good piece or software. ducks and takes cover
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoI mean, I think it's great Windows ships with a PDF viewer, so that you don't have to install a PDF viewer just to read the manual for some other application. But I've definitely felt the support burden of having three different PDF viewers on a given client PC, along with multiple configurations between them. (You can turn on and off the PDF viewers in each browser, and often embed Adobe Reader into the browser, for instance.)
- ahelwer 6y agoIt struggles on longer documents for me. You'll scroll and things will be blurry for a second or two before popping in. Personally I'm a big fan of Drawboard PDF on Windows.
- WorldMaker 6y agoEdge Classic's PDF Viewer was good, but now Edge's PDF Viewer is just Chromium's and it isn't as good, has half the features (especially for the long-form reading comfortability of the old Edge Classic / Reader), and is a higher security risk (Edge Classic / Reader ran in the UWP sandbox, Chromium PDF is a C++ app running native with much less sandboxing out of the box; Firefox uses PDF.js running in the JS VM/sandbox).
- abrowne 6y agoYou can also run PDF.js on Chromium browsers with the extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndc...
- wlesieutre 6y agoIt was fine, but it's a symptom of a greater annoyance of MS trying to launch Edge as much as they can when I'm not interested in using it. The Windows search bar still launches Edge for search results, and it's never even on purpose because why would I use that for web searches? I only get them when the search box goes "You typed 'Snipping Tool' so you probably wanted to search for 'Snipping Tool' on Bing. Let me open that in Edge for you." I did actually use IE as a frequent browser for a while when I had a Surface, on account of touch scroll/zoom being really bad in Firefox and Chrome at the time. But that was the only thing it had going for it. EDIT: and as someone else points out, Edge's PDF viewer is now Chrome's PDF viewer and it's not as good
- jxy 6y agoCan they just give me an actual PDF viewer for the sole purpose of PDF viewing? Is it really the way forward? Bundling everything into a web browser? It feels like a giant security hole.
- t0astbread 6y agoI suppose it's easier for a browser vendor to build this into their existing program than to create an entirely new one. Your sentiment is understandable to me, (my) PDF viewing is disconnected enough from web browsing to warrant being split off into a separate program. But PDF is probably an expected feature from a browser for many people.
- signal11 6y agoPDF as a native browser feature started IIRC with Chrome — until then, everyone had to use a plugin. I’ve always thought the reason Chrome built in a PDF reader was that Adobe Reader was really slow to start and brought the browsing experience to a jarring halt. People would even put in “warning: pdf” text when linking to PDFs because of how Adobe Reader slowed people down.
- foxdev 6y agoI thought PDF.js was the first implementation. Firefox added it in 2012.
- muxator 6y agoThis is my recollection, too. Firefox was first, with pdf.js
- signal11 6y agoChrome’s PDF viewer launched in Dec 2010[1] with v8.0.552. The release notes do note that a benefit of the built-in viewer is that it’s sandboxed. That’s fair enough, I guess — the Chrome team had a bee in their bonnet about plugins going all the way back to the Chrome launch comic[2]. Interestingly the Chrome team were using svn back then — that’s how long it’s been :-) [1] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2010/12/stable-beta-channel-updates.html https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2010/12/stable-beta-ch... [2] https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_28.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_28.html
- Pxtl 6y agoUnfortunately FF's PDF viewer is easily the worst, performance-wise. Whenever I view a brutally overcomplicated PDF (like a map or something) in Firefox it just trainwrecks, and I have to download it and view it in something else. Maybe they've improved it since last year or so, but I've gotten into the habit of working around pdf.js.
- jandrese 6y agoNope, feed it a modestly complex PDF and it will chew through all 16GB of RAM on my system and crash.
- eptcyka 6y agoWould you possibly have a link to a sufficiently complex PDF document? I've not encountered one in a while.
- int_19h 6y ago"Sufficiently complicated" can mean different things. E.g. a document that's long enough, or one that has a lot of vector primitives in it (basically PDF as a vector graphics format). For the former, ISO C++ drafts are a good test case. For example, here's C++20 final draft - 1841 pages: https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4860.pdf https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4860.pdf However, when I tried this in Chrome and Firefox, Firefox not only loaded it just fine, but it is also noticeably faster when scrolling. For the second, USGS publishes their topographic maps as free PDFs. These have several layers, one of which is the vectorized map, and another is satellite bitmaps. https://store.usgs.gov/filter-products?sort=relevance&scale=1%3A24%2C000&type=US+Topo&lq=pdf https://store.usgs.gov/filter-products?sort=relevance&scale=... The ones with a lot of roads and contour lines (i.e. any city that's on hills) take a while to rasterize. Say, Seattle: https://store.usgs.gov/product/499688 https://store.usgs.gov/product/499688 This one is so slow in Chrome, it's practically unusable - if you zoom in and try to pan around, it can take over a second for it to actually move. This despite the fact that it doesn't even render the satellite layer. In Firefox, you get the satellite layer (and no way to turn it off, so far as I can tell), and yet it feels more responsive. I think it's because the viewport is always adjusted immediately - actual rendering still takes a while to catch up. In Adobe Reader the rendering keeps up with scrolling, so long as the satellite layer is not enabled. If it is, it gets jerky when rendering any part for the first time. But it seems to be doing better at caching rendered parts of the document - once it's all rendered, it's smooth panning all around. Chrome and Firefox readers both keep re-rendering parts that go out of view and then back, if you scroll far enough.
- acheron 6y agoI've never been especially happy with any browser PDF viewer and always use something else. On Windows I mainly use SumatraPDF, which is super lightweight.
- Silhouette 6y agoSumatra is good for viewing, though unfortunately terrible for printing.
- barbs 6y agoReally? Surprised an app for a file format designed primarily for printing would have issues with printing. What problems are you seeing?
- Silhouette 6y agoAFAIK, Sumatra still internally renders the entire page as a bitmap in order to print it. This results in huge jobs being sent to the printer and extremely slow printing. It also seems to have some odd behaviour in its rendering process, though I've never been able to identify exactly what it is. For example, a plain black-and-white document I printed the other day looked extremely fuzzy, like the early inkjets that only had CMY ink and could only produce "black" as a muddy combination of the other colours. The same document looked normal when reprinted using different software.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago+1 for SumatraPDF. Portable, lightweight, reads EPUB and CBR/Z as well.
- dahfizz 6y agoI agree. FF is already my favorite PDF viewer by far - it's got more features than chrome and I've never felt a native PDF viewer is better in any way. But I never need complicated form filling like you mention, I just need a PDF viewer.
- bobcostas55 6y agoIt can't even copy paste normal text properly (the bug has been there for 8 years now: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=810636 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=810636). Line breaks are ignored and words are just smushed together instead. Ever since I switched to FF it has been my biggest annoyance, on Chrome this stuff just works. The best alternative on windows is PDF-XChange, fairly obscure but extremely feature-rich.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoThis is a hard problem. Unflowing text requires determining where the next line is and possibly removing optional hyphenation. PDF only deals with one line spans of text at best. Throw in super and subscripts or inline graphics and it becomes nontrivial.
- int_19h 6y agoIt's not trivial, but as the bug report points out, Adobe Reader can handle it.
- foofoo55 6y agoAnother vote for PDF-XChange. It's very good at selecting text and annotating a PDF. Plus it has excellent printing features.
- simias 6y agoI really like evince on un*x. It's pretty fast, simple yet it doesn't seem to lack any obvious feature. I don't know if it's available elsewhere though.
- muxator 6y agoEvince used to be available as a msi package on its official site. Indeed, it was my PDF reader of choice on Windows for some time. I do not know if that's still the case.
- ThePhysicist 6y agoSumatra PDF is a great PDF and eBook reader for Windows. Apart from the DRM-locked PDFs it works flawlessly and has a nice, minimal user interface and small memory footprint. Also, no spy- or adware as far as I can tell, at least if you download it from the official website.
- barbs 6y agoSeconded. I see no good reason for the average user to download the official reader over this. It's also open-source.
- bgorman 6y agoSigning PDFs might be a good reason to use the official PDF viewer
- nvr219 6y agoI use Sumatra and love it EXCEPT for when I need to use a fillable PDF. That's when I open the PDF in Chrome.
- romwell 6y agoSumatra PDF is one of the first pieces of software I install on a fresh Windows machine. Works flawlessly for all my PDF needs.
- pantalaimon 6y agoIs there any other PDF reader on Linux that supports booklet printing? I install adobe reader for that sole purpose. Heck that could even be integrated into the system print dialog so the application doesn’t even matter.
- 1f60c 6y agoMy only complaint is that zoom is way too sensitive on macOS, and that it can't be used to fill out forms, as you mention.
- andrepd 6y agoWhy Adobe though? On Linux, qpdfview. On Windows, sumatra.
- monadic2 6y agoWhy are they shipping a PDF viewer in the first place? Seems like a massive security problem tbh.
- mickotron 6y agoOkular can do all that, might not be as user friendly but definitely gets the job done. And yes if you run Windows it is available on the windows store.
- kiliancs 6y agoThere are so many cases that pdf.js can't handle that it seems like a bad idea to open the door to that trap to users that might not know better.