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.
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September 1st, 2006 at 7:01 pm
Anyway of adding new document types to the list?
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September 6th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
*shrug*
Windows only.
I do not get the point of discussing non-portable extensions to portable applications like Firefox.
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January 26th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
You do not mention which version of Firefox these instructions are for, but the current Firefox 2.0.0.1 is different. It should now be:
Tools > Options > Select the Content tab > Under File Types, click the Manage tab. Then follow the instructions of your screen cap.
However, I cannot get Foxit to load within Firefox, it opens it’s own application window. Am I wrong on how to do this?
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January 26th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Instructions were provided for, then current, Firefox 1.5. Thanks for the update.
Foxit doesn’t provide a plugin as Adobe Reader does, so documents can’t be opened inside Firefox, which I personally prefer.
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