PDF relief

The PDF (Portable Document Format) is great, as a pretty safe way to deliver facsimile copies of a document independently of the recipient's operating system or application. I have been asking for integrated PDF support (as in "Save as PDF…") for Firefox for a while and about 70% of a recent Mozilla survey agreed it should be considered for Firefox integration. But when PDFs mean loading Adobe Reader's within Firefox it is a not so good situation. Reader is as bloated as it can be and uses loads of memory and is a very safe way to slow down your system.

I prefer Foxit Reader which offers 99% of what I need of a PDF reader in a much lighter, snappier application. There is also open source Sumatra PDF (again, Windows only) but since it's in its early stages (version 0.2) its feature set is very short.

Once you have any of them installed and defined as the default handler for PDF files you can tell Firefox to use it for PDF files. In the Tools menu, select Options…. In the Downloads page press View and Edit Actions…, select the PDF extension and press Change Action.

Now you can choose to open this type of documents with the Reader plugin, download it to your PC and do nothing else, or choose a specific application like Sumarea PDF or Foxit Reader.

Bonus tip: If you are tired of having the QuickTime plugin loaded every time you click on an MP3 file, you can do the same with it and point it to your preferred media player.