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Comment by opinali | Hacker News Reader

Please take your time machine and go release PDF.js in early 2010. With good performance on the hardware and Javascript VMs of early 2010. Then I'll grant you the criticism of Chrome's PDF viewer. Otherwise, trolling... fact is, Chrome is the browser that liberated the world from Acrobat Reader. PDF.js is awesome and it may be the way to go, but as of today Chrome's viewer is still much better -- please try http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf in both browsers and tell me which one is sluggish and renders so-so, and which renders/scrolls instantly and perfectly and also allows you to actually fill the form.

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Since I'm blind Firefox wins every time over Google Chrome. I tried out the link you had in your comment and I can at least read some of the text in Firefox with my screen reading software. I assume this is because Firefox turns it into some form of HTML that is then accessible through the normal function of assistive technology. Google Chrome uses some kind of plugin that doesn’t provide any accessibility support so I get a blank page without any text. Even if the performance isn’t as good I’d much rather deal with things that are rendered to HTML and JavaScript.

This is a good point, but a separate issue (and kudos to PDF.js if accessibility was a purposeful design point of their implementation, not just a happy coincidence... they could certainly have chosen other avenues, such as generating a WebGL scene that would be opaque to screen readers). And Chrome's viewer should indeed be accessible, I'll raise this question internally.

For that to have been a happy coincidence is basically impossible with PDF. You're told a run of positioned glyphs to render, but then you have to figure out what text those really represent by looking at the font tables (even the simplest documents tend to contain ligatures)...and that's before you assemble the runs into sentences, paragraphs, columns etc, generally without help from the PDF, although it can optionally contain this info. The first version of PDF.js rendered positioned images of text runs, text extraction came later and was definitely deliberate.

(I was paying attention, as I wrote some of the code to do multicolumn text selection in poppler)

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.

I don't have firefox and a pdf view won't change that. Your description of Safari matches that of Chromium on Arch Linux.

Does Chromium have a built in PDF reader? I thought google adds that in for Chrome along with Flash?

It is not included, but can be installed. (libpdf)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Open_PDF_files...

I 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.

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.

When you pop the PDF out, it then gets passed to the full Preview.app.

>> 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.

That 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.

The 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.

Ideally, 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.

PDF 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

just a note, but you can do that in linux and afaik windows as well

on Windows, you can print to XPS out of the box, but not PDF.

> Please take your time machine and go [to] early 2010... Chrome's PDF viewer... fact is, Chrome is the browser that liberated the world from Acrobat Reader.

Fact check:

August 31, 2006: "Current versions of Safari are able to access PDF documents in a number of different ways. It can display the documents inline (in the Web browser window) without the use of a plug-in, it can use the Adobe Preview plug-in to display documents inline with added controls, or it can pass PDF viewing duties off to another application like Adobe Reader or Apple's own Preview.app."

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10327228-263.html

"Google Chrome ... was released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and as a stable public release on December 11, 2008."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome

Safari, outside of mobile, just isn't used like Chrome is.

Chrome liberated us from Adobe Reader because its what we actually use.

Bollocks. Chrome's PDF implementation absolutely sucks. I have numerous PDF documents which it can't handle at all. I've just opened them in Firefox 19 and they are absolutely spot on.

I'm uninstalling Acrobat reader for a week to see how it goes now. Chrome never gave me that.

Can you link them please? We already have links to PDF's rendering better in Chrome. I'd like to see where pdf.js does a better job.

Unfortunately not as they contain sensitive information (financial contracts).

They both display about the same (nothing a casual glance could reveal). Firefox took ~ 1 second, while Chrome was slightly faster <1 second. It's hard to count. But it's about the same give or take a few hundred miliseconds.

My setup is FF 19.0 and Chrome 24 on Win7 with 8Gb Ram and 3.1GHz processor.

Chrome's PDF viewer lacks the basic features one expects from a PDF viewer. It doesn't make sense to abandon the concept of pages or not support ToC. Those things are essential in PDFs. pdf.js handles all of those things. And there were browsers being able to display PDF before Chrome. KDE's Konqueror could simply load KPDF and Safari had Preview.app embedded.

I wish Google would abandon their viewer (which is closed source btw) and rather start using and contributing to pdf.js.

On average, I might need to fill out a PDF once or twice a year. Otherwise rendering for either one is perfectly fine for me.

This was just a random example. I'm sure if you take a statistically-significant variety of PDFs and benchmark rendering quality, speed and features in all PDF viewers out there, PDF.js won't be any closer to the top; Chrome's viewer will certainly not be the very best but not one of the worst either.

Was early 2011 that different a place? Anecdotally, I've run PDF.js on a PowerPC desktop from 2005 with a late 2011 version of Firefox, and it was a bit pokier than I'd like, but it was usable for me.

(BTW: Apologies, it looks like I somehow fat-fingered a downvote on your post. Unfortunately there's no way to undo that on Hacker News. No slight intended.)

From what I can gather Chrome's PDF viewer pretty much is Acrobat Reader. (It's also not available to users of the open-source version Chromium - in fact, as far as I can tell there's no decent way to read PDFs in Chromium at all.)

The pdf.js repository contains a Chrome/Chromium plugin, which works for me. YMMV.

The PDF viewer in Chrome is available to Chromium users (just copying the libpdf.so or libpdf.DLL file into the appropriate directory works); it's just not open source.

I think for most people, when they say "available," they mean "without copyright infringement."

As long as you don't distribute chromium with this file, then it will be fine. (You do it yourself).

I'm not sure what the rules are: Google gives me permission to install Chrome, and then, presumably I have permission to delete everything but the PDF viewer plugin, right? Maybe the Chrome EULA disallows this, but, to be honest, I didn't read it.

Ahhh. I couldn't find any information on how to do this the last time I looked.

It's FoxIt, not Acrobat.

Mac users would say it was Safari. :)

Or OmniWeb before that. PDF in the browser? Congrats, you're only twelve years behind.

Uhm... on my machine, the firefox version actually loads this just as quickly and with notably smoother scrolling? I guess it's the other way around on your machine. It doesn't allow form filling though.

Honestly I couldn't care either way. Even the acrobat plugin seems to be much better behaved these days, so...

>Chrome's viewer is still much better

On Linux - both FF19 and Chrome Stable are very close. FF rendering is a bit jerkier than Chrome but not by much.

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