Mozilla Puts Native PDF Viewer in Firefox 19

The Portable Document Format is one of the more ubiquitous document types both on the Web and on personal devices, and can be used for distributing manuals, brochures, and most other formatted documents. However, until now Firefox, one of the more popular Web browsers, in part due to its availability on OS X, Windows, and Linux, has not had a built-in PDF reader. Instead, to open PDFs it's been necessary to either install a browser plug-in or download the PDFs and open them in a managing program like Apple's Preview.

In Firefox 19, released yesterday, if you open a PDF either from a Web link or from your hard drive, it will appear in the browser in a simple but efficient interface that has options for zooming (manually or automatically), viewing a PDF in a full-screen presentation mode, navigating to specific pages by number, and scrolling through thumbnails of the loaded document.