Firefox 19 Beta Brings JavaScript-Based PDF Viewer

For those not busy playing around with the Snowshoe web-browser, the beta of Mozilla Firefox 19.0 has been released and is ready for testing.

The main end-user feature to Firefox 19 is PDF.js, a native Adobe PDF file viewer for the Firefox web-browser. As implied by its name, PDF.js is actually written in JavaScript for its native handling of PDF documents.

This PDF viewer for Firefox has been a long time coming and has been available previously as an experimental feature that could be toggled on, but now with Firefox 19.0 it will be available by default.

For helping out developers using Firefox 19, there's now support for an experimental Remote Web Console so that remotely Firefox can be used for debugging web issues from either fellow versions of Firefox for the desktop or from Mozilla's port of Firefox to Android mobile devices. Firefox for Android in 19.0 also has greater ARMv6 support and can work on an expanded number of mobile devices.

Mozilla Firefox 19.0 Beta 1 can be downloaded from Mozilla.org for all major operating systems.