PDFs, Firefox and Mac

If you use Firefox as the primary web browser on your Mac, then you must have noticed that it is a pain to work with a bunch of PDF files. Luckily, now there is a solution.

As a part of my work, I need to open and work with a lot of pdf files. Often, these are research papers published in scientific journals. When I click on a link to open a pdf file, Firefox-Mac (unlike Safari) cannot open that pdf file in the browser window. It will download a copy of that file to the disk and then (if you have set the preferences that way), Preview.app will open it. It is really annoying because then I have to switch windows (Firefox to Preview) in order to work with a webpage and a pdf file simultaneously.

A good friend sent me a link to this post on Ars Technica that talks about a Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac. You can download that plug-in directly from this website. All you have to do is to click on 'Install Now' link to download and install this nifty plug-in (This plugin requires that you use Firefox 3. If you haven't done it already, you should download and install Firefox 3. You have to restart firefox after installation).

As good as this plugin is, it has a few important issues that need to be worked out. These are a few things I noticed:

• Go to this link to open a map of Smoky Mountain National Park from the website of NPS. First thing I noticed, the cursor is in 'text selection' mode. On a map like this, I would like to click-and-move around the map area which is not possible. Only way to move around the map is to use scrollbars.
  
• With no toolbars, it is difficult for users to know how to Zoom-in/Zoom-out. Cmd+ or Cmd- keystrokes do that job.
  
• To 'Save' this PDF file to disk, you need to go to the 'File' menu, Click on 'Save Page As...' and save it as a PDF to disk. Similarly, in order to print, you need to go to the 'File' menu and click 'Print'.
  
• Go to this link to open a scientific paper from the Journal of Biological Chemistry. This pdf file is now part of a frame in the current window. Saving this pdf file to disk following the method mentioned above does not work. Nor does the trick to print.
  [Update: You can still save the pdf from 'File' menu. Click somewhere in the pdf to activate the frame. Then uust choose 'Save Frame as...' instead of 'Save Page as...']
  

With these few issues (that I came across in the first few minutes of my usage; and a few more found here) still to be ironed out , this plugin needs to be perfected. In spite of that, this is a wonderful extension - the one that I have been waiting ever since I bought my mac. Thanks to colesbury and everyone else involved with firefox-mac-pdf plugin.