View PDFs inline in Firefox 3

Jun 18, '08 07:30:04AM

Contributed by: Typhoon14

This hint is really just a link, but there have been several other hints dealing with PDF plug-ins for Mac browsers -- the Adobe plug-in only supports Safari) -- and this represents the first real solution for Firefox 3 I have seen.

There is now a Firefox extension named firefox-mac-pdf, available for Firefox 3 under OS 10.5 that utilizes the built-in PDF support in OS X to display PDFs in-browser. In my testing, it appears to work very well. It doesn't have the nifty fading bezel that the Safari PDF viewer does, but it supports all the same keyboard shortcuts and you get the standard Mac OS PDF contextual menu when you control-click on a displayed PDF.

[robg adds: This plug-in takes care of the only major complaint I had about Firefox; being able to view a PDF inline instead of opening it in Preview after downloading is a nice timesaver. I tested the plug-in this morning with about a dozen PDFs, and it worked great on all of them. The hint was submitted noting "Intel only," but the plug-in seems to work fine on my 12" PowerBook G4, too.]

[Updated 6/19: Removed 10.5-only restriction on hint.]

Comments (26)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080616163154556