Rid yourself of Adobe: New Firefox 19.0 gets JAVASCRIPT PDF viewer

Built-in reader escapes into wild from beta incubator

Mozilla's Firefox web browser now includes a built-in PDF viewer - allowing users to bin plugins from Adobe and other developers.

The move to run third-party PDF file readers out of town comes after security holes were discovered in closed-source add-ons from FoxIt and Adobe. The new built-in document viewer is open source, just like Firefox, and is written in JavaScript.

No plugin required to peek at this portable-document-format file

The web browser's PDF.js emerged as a beta version in January, and yesterday was added to the mainstream build of Firefox, specifically the new version 19.0. There's more on the HTML5 and JavaScript used to create the PDF reader right here.

As an upside of using HTML5 and JavaScript, the viewer is multi-platform and works across PCs, tablets and mobile phones - it should also work in other web browsers.

"Not only do most PDFs load and render quickly, they run securely and have an interface that feels at home in the browser," Mozilla's bods added, apparently comfortable that their new PDF.js tool has fewer security issues than Adobe's well-established plugin. ®