Show PDF inline

Feature	Status	ETA	Owner
Show PDF inline	Need to figure out platform approach	N/A	Alex Limi

Summary

The current handling of PDFs in Firefox isn't great. The plugin-based renderer on Windows has several issues, and the situation on the Mac is that there really isn't a good renderer available for PDFs.

We want to be able to show PDFs inline in the browser on at least the majority of the platforms we support, and be able to wrap our own UI around it to support things like viewing and saving to disk, etc.

Team

• Feature Manager: Alex Limi (for now)
• Lead Developer: Josh Aas?
• Product Manager:
• QA:
• UX:
• Accessibility:
• Security:
• Privacy:

Release Requirements

• Ability to view a PDF document inline on Windows, Mac OS X, and possibly Linux.

Next Steps & Open Issues

• Figure out what our approach is going to be.

Alternatives:

1. Use the platform support for PDF in the cases where it's available, e.g. on Mac OS X via PDFkit: http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/
2. We could also do a hybrid approach, e.g. use Adobe plugin on Windows, and PDFkit on the Mac.
3. Use the pdf.js renderer

Designs

• The download manager article talks about how to show content inline and allow people to download it too: http://limi.net/articles/improving-download-behaviors-web-browsers

Goals

• Make viewing of PDF in the web browser as painless as possible.