Firefox 19 Launches With Built-In PDF Viewer

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 19 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The improvements include a built-in PDF viewer on the desktop and theme support as well as lower CPU requirements on Google's mobile platform. You can see the official changelogs here: desktop and Android."

Blogspam!

[roboticbebop]

TFA links to blogspam, below is the actual release note list from Mozilla

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/19.0/releasenotes/ [mozilla.org]

Come on, guys.

Re:What about Save As PDF

[cristiroma]

Guess what? I have Firefox 18 and already has that. Go to File ... > Print ... > PDF > Save as PDF (also, Save as PostScript). Maybe only on Mac?

Re:What about Save As PDF

[MrYingster]

That's a Mac thing. Any program that uses Apple's built-in printer dialog can do it. So handy!

Re:What about Save As PDF

[Junta]

It also happens in Linux. Don't have Windows handy at the moment, but I'd be surprised if Firefox on OSX and Linux has it but Windows did not.

Re:What about Save As PDF

[JackieBrown]

Windows does not have it (at least not XP.) Linux does, as you said. I use that feature more than I actually print.

Zombie compartments, four versions ago

[tepples]

We banned it from our company after waiting years for various memory leaks to be fixed.

That was fixed. The Firefox memory heap is now divided into "compartments", and Firefox 15 changed memory management to be more aggressive at purging compartments associated with closed pages [mozilla.org].

Re:Page Numbers

[oji-sama]

Yes, it displays page numbers and supports jumping. Also includes buttons for moving a page up or down (left and right keys work as shortcuts)

Re:In version 20 Firefox will have built-in Emacs!

[maztuhblastah]

Don't you get the irony of Phoenix? It's a small and light version of Firefox which was a small and light version of Mozilla. It's turtles all the way down man.

Uh... I think he does. Firefox used to be called Firebird. You know why? Because hey had to change the original name: Phoenix.

Re:What about Save As PDF

[number11]

It would be handy, if you actually wanted to produce pdf. Given that Adobe's pdf tools are what most people use, and that those are absolutely the largest vector for malware IN THE WORLD, I don't want any more pdf around.

Why is anyone using Adobe Reader anymore? There are several very nice alternatives, including Foxit [foxitsoftware.com], PDF-Xchange [tracker-software.com], Sumatra [kowalczyk.info], Slim [investintech.com] and others. I haven't used Adobe on any of my computers for years.

Great, more bloat

[xiando]

My 800 MHz ARM Android phone can't even run Firefox because of it's resource requirements (I'm glad there's Dolphin) and it's getting bigger and slower, not faster and learner, on my desktop. I'd rather see JavaScript speeds improvements and fat cutting. There's plenty of good external programs for opening PDF files already (okular, evince, etc), the browser does not need to open PDF files itself any more than it needs to open OpenDocument spreadsheets.

Re:What about Save As PDF

[Bazzargh]

Windows doesn't have it because Adobe didn't want MS to do it.

This is why MS made XPS [cnet.com]

Stuart Parmenter wrote an extension for firefox after it started using Cairo (FF3) which would let you print pdf - since with Cairo that came pretty much free. It never made it into the default UI (as you say - it's not needed on Linux and Mac) and since the rendering architecture moved again to azure&skia I guess rendering to pdf wasn't free any more, and the extension no longer works.

Re:Zombie compartments, four versions ago

[Ginger Unicorn]

After some cursory googling around, I can only find benchmarks showing firefox using significantly less ram than other browsers. A couple [avantbrowser.com] of examples. [winmatrix.com]