The search is still your run of the mill Firefox search with very limited options.

Despite its lack of bells and whistles, it seems to have all the basic features you might need for working with a PDF including a slider for viewing the PDF pages (as thumbnails or text), plus or minus bottoms for magnification, presentation mode, printing option and save.

The Firefox PDF interface is clean – almost spartan and it is very neatly integrated into the browser, unlike all of the other solution we tested.

Using Explorer 9 with a Foxit reader add-on it actually only took about 25 seconds but it was more annoying since the browser didn’t give any indication it is downloading anything (just a blank screen for 25 seconds).

The result – on our connection speed it took about 30 seconds to open using both browsers – so no difference here.

Although this has more to do with download speed than anything else, the PDF viewer does effect the time it takes to open the PDF.

We tried using Firefox 19 as well as the latest stable version of Chrome (.57).

We decided to open a random (and large – 18mb) PDF file from the web.

So for the sake of all those Firefox users who don’t like to count on third part add-ons/software we decided to check out the new browser and it viewer and see how it compares to other solutions. However in recent years the PDF format had become so popular and pervasive that more and more programs are now offering built in support (Chrome for example has a built in PDF viewer since later 2010). So far Firefox users had to rely on 3’rd party add-ons or software to read PDF files (Adobe Acrobat and Foxit readers come to mind).

Adobe pdf viewer for firefox