25 March 2011

Firefox 4 on OS X--No PDF Support!!!

Thought I would just post some quick thoughts on the new Firefox 4. I installed it today on my Macbook Pro i7 in OS X (10.6.7). I made sure I didn't write over my Firefox 3 install. It was a lot of fiddling to install all my addons. My first impressions are that it's definitely snappier. However, I ran into a couple of very serious problems within minutes that make Firefox 4 a nonstarter for now for serious Mac users.

Firstly, there's no support for OS X's built in PDF rendering from within Firefox 4. In Firefox 3 there has been a work around with the addon Firefox PDF Plugin for OS X. However, this has not been updated and I could not get it working in Firefox 4. I also couldn't find a work around for this problem. Huge crisis! Using Adobe Reader is obviously a non-option. The other problem I have is that after installing all my addons and finally getting 1password installed, the thing now crashes at startup! Piece of crap. I now have to start it in safe mode or whatever. I think it will be easier to just leave this build alone until folks figure out how to view PDF files within the browser using built in support. I can't believe we're still at this stage on the Mac platform. Proper PDF support is not optional. I know Windows users are used to bad PDF support, but OS X has great PDF support baked in. Why on earth wouldn't the folks developing Firefox not hook into this feature is simply incomprehensible. Another annoyance with Firefox on OS X is that it ignores keyboard shortcut changes. Firefox is a pretty big piece of crap on OS X even before this update, but it is essential for webdevelopment. Safari, Chrome, even Opera are better options for any other task. Too bad. What do you think of the new Firefox 4?

1 comment:

Philosopher Dog said...

Ok. I solved the problem by making FF4 run in 32 bit and installing the addon from this site http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/issues/detail?id=182&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Stars%20Owner%20Summary .