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by lazyjeff 5775 days ago
I don't find being able to view the mangled pdf on screen worth the time saved downloading the actual pdf. With video and audio I can understand the benefit of in-browser viewing, but why do we need this service for pdfs anyway?
2 comments
d2viant 5775 days ago
It's horribly confusing to someone who doesn't understand that it's not being rendered by the browser itself. PDF's (especially when rendered inside the browser) break the browsing experience.

Your browser controls stop working as expected, history gets bent, links don't work as expected. All of a sudden you're now working within an Adobe Reader application or FoxIt Reader (albeit embedded in the browser) without even realizing you're in an entirely different context outside of an HTML page.

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ugh 5775 days ago
Links and history work as expected (at least in the browsers I know with native PDF support) and I’m not sure why it is bad that some users might not understand that a PDF document is not a HTML page.

I also don’t know how Scribd helps users understand that better. Seems horribly confusing to me if you don’t follow them closely. (Wait what? The PDF is suddenly a webpage? But sometimes Flash? I can still download the PDF? Why doesn’t it look exactly like the webpage? What’s going on?) It’s perfectly usable, even without a deep grasp of the concepts, but so are PDF viewers inside browsers.

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DougBTX 5775 days ago
The problem historically with plug-in PDF readers was that the Adobe one was very slow. That seems to be fixed now - though I can't tell if the software is better or I just use faster hardware.
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ugh 5775 days ago
Especially since downloading is no extra step if your browser can display PDFs natively. (Safari can, Chrome will soon and I’m pretty sure there are plugins for other browsers.)

I’m using Safari and to me viewing PDFs is the same as viewing webpages. Heck, it’s even a bit more comfortable. (There is one big button with which I can open the PDF in Preview which allows me to rearrange/delete pages and to annotate and there is another big button which allows me to save the PDF for later reading.)

What Scribd does certainly is impressive, I’m just not sure how useful it is.

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