[xxpor]

Multiple people have said they prefer not getting surprise PDFs. Could you elaborate on why? It's never something I've ever thought about. PDFs open in the browser now for most people, so it seems like it shouldn't make much difference?

[FabHK]

I was going to add that some people on slow connections might not want to download large PDFs.

However, in today's web, the html page with the abstract (one paragraph) was a 2.5 MB download, while the 15 page paper including a figure was just 800 kB.

[xxpor]

That's honestly an incredible indictment of today's web, isn't it?

[doetoe]

In my particular case PDFs linked from hacker news (accessed through the nextcloud feed reader) end up in my phone's downloads, which in that way fills up with PDFs I only wanted to read once.

[kadoban]

There may be more of a security risk with PDFs, hard to say though. This was likely more of an issue back when using an external program to view them was a requirement.