[fusslo]

I dont know if this is in the same vein, but I want to complain about how websites handle pdfs.

Slack, Teams, confluence, jira, etc all open a pdf in a in-browser preview thing. Then if you try scrolling, it makes the PAGE contents bigger, but does NOT zoom into the pdf.

Who thought of this? Who thought it was a good idea?

Never have I wanted to open a preview of the pdf.

[Arrath]

Seriously. I have a featureful PDF viewer I am intimately familiar with. I want it to be the default for all PDFs, ever. This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.

[telotortium]

Not sure how bad it is these days, but Adobe Reader used to open pretty slowly (and if you had Adobe Acrobat open your PDFs by default, it was even slower), so an in-browser PDF viewer was appreciated for that purpose.

Also, it can be useful to keep the PDF in the context of the app you opened it in. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a window manager that surfaces the fact that, for example, one macOS Preview window was opened from the browser, another from Slack, another from Finder, etc. Compare to iOS, where opening a PDF viewer from an app will result in a button at the top-left corner to go back to the app you opened it from.

[cubefox]

> This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.

The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.

I agree website viewers are pointless. But most of the time I actually like the browser viewer better, if it opens links directly, than offline viewers. Because I regard PDFs as websites (similar to jpeg files), and I normally don't want to accumulate them in my download folder.

I agree though that the browser viewers are often too bare-bones.

[Arrath]

>The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.

Which tend to be, imo, even worse! I think I'd rather have a toner container explode on me than try to suffer through the experience of using Aconex's PDF utility ever again.

[friedtofu]

This sounds more like however your OS handles opening the PDF mimetype(xdg-open,open,Invoke-Item) I'm assuming you're on windows. I think often times browsers will just be set to the default for previewing a PDF unless set otherwise. This is all just conjecture though as I don't use any of the tools you listed above and I'm not absolutely certain of how Windows/MacOS handles PDFs by default.

Twitter's handling of opening links in its own webview is a bit different, unless Slack, Teams, Confluence, Jira all open these browser instances within some sort of webview wrapper as well(I wouldn't think so). So its a little bit different

[stephen_g]

No, what they are talking about is that you click on a link to see a PDF in these web apps, and instead of serving up the PDF document itself, they serve up a page in their web app that embeds a PDF viewer.

I assume they are trying to be "helpful" but 99% of the time the user's browser can render the PDF more conveniently than the app's embedded viewer (not breaking scrolling and zooming etc.)