6 ms·
On the mac, Firefox Nightly loads the PDF in a second while Google Chrome Dev loads in about three seconds. I can enter text in the pdf in Chrome while Firefox
by Watabou 14y ago
On the mac, Firefox Nightly loads the PDF in a second while Google Chrome Dev loads in about three seconds. I can enter text in the pdf in Chrome while Firefox gives an annoying little "The pdf might not be rendered perfectly" error bar at the top.
Let's try Safari: Loads in under a second maybe even faster, super quick scrolling, ability to enter text and the option to download the pdf on the bottom. This is the way browsers should handle pdf. We are just not there yet. I don't want to use Safari though. Firefox is the browser for me.
I almost always download the pdf anyways and view it through Preview.app, especially if I want to actually input text in the pdf. I love Preview. It's like the best PDF reader out there. Preview is what liberated me from Acrobat. Well, switching to the Mac did that for me, really.
- ___1___ 14y agoI don't have firefox and a pdf view won't change that. Your description of Safari matches that of Chromium on Arch Linux.
- Watabou 14y agoDoes Chromium have a built in PDF reader? I thought google adds that in for Chrome along with Flash?
- natex 14y agoIt is not included, but can be installed. (libpdf) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Open_PDF_files_inside_Chromium https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Open_PDF_files...
- omaranto 14y agoI don't think that's right: I use Chromium on Arch Linux and it does not seem to have a PDF viewer. It always offers to download PDFs and open them with a separate program, often warning me first that PDFs from unknown sources can be dangerous.
- jpxxx 14y agoTo be sure, Safari is invoking a system level PDF reader to handle inline PDFs. That's what gets you that silky performance and nice rendering. When you pop the PDF out, it then gets passed to the full Preview.app.
- w0utert 14y ago>> To be sure, Safari is invoking a system level PDF reader to handle inline PDFs. That's what gets you that silky performance and nice rendering. Which, IMO, is the way it should be, and not just for PDFs. I'm impressed by the fact that Mozilla implemented a capable PDF reader in JavaScript, but I won't be using it. Firefox and Chrome are both trying too hard to duplicate everything my OS already provides: their own video codecs, audio codecs, image codecs, the Flash plugin (Chrome), now a PDF viewer, and so on. I'd rather just have my browser render HTML/CSS, run JavaScript, and that's about it. It doesn't have to implement anything else itself, all modern OS's should have everything required to display all the embedded content.
- rys 14y agoThat only works if you don't care about fragmenting what features you support on multiple OSes, and trust those codes to do the right thing in all of your use cases for it. For some of the browsers it's clearly better for them to bundle the kitchen sink, since at least it's their kitchen sink and guarantees the kitchen sink will always be there.
- rictic 14y agoThe main problem I see with that is security. PDF is a huge attack surface, reducing that to the already existing and well tested javascript surface is a huge win. Ideally (in my mind) every browser will come to use Mozilla's pdf implementation.
- jfb 14y agoIdeally, I would trust my OS vendor and be safe using their superior PDF renderer. I think my ideal world is likelier to come to pass than yours, sad to say.
- RandallBrown 14y agoPDF performance is great on the Mac because Apple's 2d drawing system is actually based on the PDF spec. You can even "print" to a pdf from just about any Mac application that supports printing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D
- esbwhat 14y agojust a note, but you can do that in linux and afaik windows as well
- iso-8859-1 14y agoon Windows, you can print to XPS out of the box, but not PDF.