Firefox PDF on OSX

June 3 was a fantastic day, though I didn’t know it at the time. The reason? My biggest bitch about Firefox has finally been fixed. The big problem is that Firefox’s OSX program has the default behavior of saving PDFs to Desktop and starting Preview with it. Which isn’t a huge problem, except that if you download the file several times, it just downloads a file with -N appended. This is sortof a pain because in college a lot of teachers call files hw5.pdf, which means that I pretty much have to go to the website each time, or look through about 5 files each time.

But no more. Someone FINALLY wrote an in-browser PDF viewer. This means no more downloading, no more pain. If Firefox’s success wasn’t based on shipping a very good HTML parser with a great extensible framework while stripping most unnecesary stuff, I would say that they should have included it in the standard Firefox. I guess I can let it slide, but it’s seriously a must-have tool for all OSX Firefox users.

Serious. Go and get it, now. Here’s the link: [firefox-mac-pdf](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pdf-plugin-for-firefox-on-mac-/ firefox-mac-pdf)

Update Sept 25, 2011: The above link doesn’t seem to work with recent versions of firefox. Schubert-it’s Plugin-PDF seems to work pretty well. It’s only free for academic and personal use, though.

Why can’t someone write a decent, free/open source version of a stupid PDF plugin?