I have been an avid Firefox user for quite some time. But when I moved to Intel-based Macs, I discovered that that Schubert’s PDF Browser Plugin didn’t work on Intel Macs (except if I placed Firefox in Rosetta mode, running its PPC code in emulation). hat project appears to have died on the vine, with no updates in abut 2 years. Furthermore, Adobe has insisted on making its inline PDF plugin Safari-only. This always struck me as rather redundant, since Apple has used Mac OS X’s Quartz graphics engine to allow viewing of PDFs inline in Safari. This, combined with Firefox’s longer launch times, made me slowly shift to using Safari about 80% of the time.

Yesterday, Firefox 3 was released. I have been using the betas for the last month and have been happy with its improved speed and functionality. Its part of the reason I am back to about a 50/50 split in Safari vs. Firefox use. Today, the other show fell in the form of this posting on MacOS X Hints:

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.

Its interface is not quite as easy to use as Schubert’s plugin, but it works. I now have inline PDF viewing in Firefox and things are better in the world again.

Saving PDFs: The one issue I noticed is there was no seemingly obvious way to save the PDF once you were viewing it. Nothing in the contextual menu allowing “Save as…” for example. Turns out it was easier to save the PDF than I imagined. In the “Issues” page for firefox-max-pdf I found this exchange which included the solution:

Currently there are two ways of saving the PDF:

  1. File->Save Page As menu
  2. The apple-s (command-s) keyboard shortcut