PDF.js, Mozilla’s project to render PDFs natively and securely inside the browser without any plugins has been finally turned on by default in Firefox 19 beta which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. PDF.js works even on other browsers too that support HTML5, Mozilla at present is working to offer this to Google Chrome through an extension, we don’t have much details to share.
To try out the major feature native PDF viewer offered by Mozilla, download and install Firefox beta on your Computer and try to drag and drop any PDF file from your hard drive to the browser or try to load this links for PDFs found on Google search results instead.
PDF.js, Firefox’s Native PDF Viewer features
- Firefox’s PDF.js with black UI offers controls on top for navigation.
- automatic zoom is set by default for every document however you can able to zoom in/out contents of page manually also.
- Presentation mode lets you view document in full screen mode.
- You can bookmark the PDF file and download it to your Computer also.
- Supports printing, we’ve to talk about PDF files printing here
Mozilla specially had to create a new API MozPrintcallback that allows to print hundred or more pages in a PDF document easily with high quality without the need to render every page before printing,
- Right click menu on any page in PDF document lets you rotate the page in clock-wise or anti-clockwise direction.
Performance: Firefox PDF Viewer is powered by JavaScript, so you can expect faster loading of PDFs using its IonMonkey JavaScript engine which landed in Firefox 18.
Disabling PDF.js
You can disable this PDF Viewer so that PDFs can be opened inline in browser by third-party plugins. For that you need to turn “pdf.js disabled” preference value in about:config value “true”.