Firefox 19 Release Today Brings The PDF Viewer

[Akka]

I have not tried any advanced stuff but when I needed it after the update to firefox 19 it did what it was supposed to do. And it didn't crash. It's already better than the adobe abomination.

[curaga]

ABS has about zero pictures or other fancy things, it's all text, no?

[jonaternet]

I like pdf.js !

I just opened that 907 pages document : http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/abs-guide.pdf it was all rendered in about one second, and switching to page 400 was done instantly. it is faster that the adobe's plugin I used at work until now, I use to consult huge pdf documents, such as Sun frames user manuals... So, I am pretty satisfied of that new feature. I suppose, however, that it is not so good if you have low bandwich, since it renders the whole document at once...

[Wilfred]

pdf.js render a lot of pages and keep it in RAM. Evince render only current page(s). In the case of pdf.js a big book with hundred of pages or more will be kept cached in memory in from first page to the last viewed page. So memory consumption will be huge. Anyway memory management in Firefox is already catastrophic with or without opened pdf documents.

That explains, but as for the last statement, the mozilla/firefox people took note around firefox 7 and from about firefox ten forward firefox is again pretty lean. That is doesn't use as much memory as it used to.

[onicsis]

pdf.js render a lot of pages and keep it in RAM. Evince render only current page(s). In the case of pdf.js a big book with hundred of pages or more will be kept cached in memory in from first page to the last viewed page. So memory consumption will be huge. Anyway memory management in Firefox is already catastrophic with or without opened pdf documents.

[madbiologist]

Seems mozilla recognized they made a huge mistake:

"Prepare a hotfix to disable pdf.js, targeting FF18 and 19 (all platforms, release channel)":
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=839239

But they don't say why, do you know? I just disabled it, it is way too slow.

Unfortunately I don't think they have recognised their mistake yet. According to the bug description this hotfix was prepared a part of a contingency plan in case they need/want to disable pdf.js:

We need to prepare a hotfix for pdfjs.disabled=true, targeting FF19 (all platforms). This doesn't need to target FF19.0a1/a2. We may not end up using this hotfix, but we should prepare/test it in case we need to utilize it.

None of the subsequent comments in the bug indicate that they have actually decided to disable it

I'm beginning to get the feeling that they are just going to leave it enabled and slowly improve it in Firefox 19, 20 and 21. Hopefully by Firefox 21 we will have something similar in speed and rendering accuracy to poppler.

[Wilfred]

Seems mozilla recognized they made a huge mistake:

"Prepare a hotfix to disable pdf.js, targeting FF18 and 19 (all platforms, release channel)":
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=839239

But they don't say why, do you know? I just disabled it, it is way too slow.

[Linuxhippy]

Seems mozilla recognized they made a huge mistake:

"Prepare a hotfix to disable pdf.js, targeting FF18 and 19 (all platforms, release channel)":

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=839239

[JS987]

They want it in javascript so they can use it on any device such as firefox os, set top boxes etc which only support html5 and javascript. Writing in javascript is the best way, it just needs improving, have patience.

If device supports html5 and javascript, it means it has Firefox installed, which is written in C++. If device can run Firefox, it can also run PDF viewer written in C++.

[Thaodan]

They want it in javascript so they can use it on any device such as firefox os, set top boxes etc which only support html5 and javascript. Writing in javascript is the best way, it just needs improving, have patience.

Boxes that support Firefox, support poppler too. I don't see why do everything in Javascript even if its not wise.