Enable the Built-in PDF Reader in Firefox 15

Mozilla recently rolled out Firefox 15, the latest version of the browser in their new rapid-release schedule.  With this new release there are quite a few new features, which have been outlined in the above linked post.  One interesting feature that bears a little more attention and some explanation is the new built-in PDF reader.

Building a PDF reader right into the browser is important for a couple of reasons – one is that it speeds up the execution of these files online, but the other is security.  Previously users have mostly plugged the Adobe PDF Reader into their browser because it’s well known and it’s also the first option that comes to mind for many.  However, the Adobe app is notorious for it’s security problems.  With the new Mozilla feature we will, hopefully, get a more stable and secure way to view these files online.

Before we get started you will need to make sure you are running Firefox 15 (or higher if you subscribe to the beta).  To do this you can simply click the “Help” option on the menu bar and choose “About Firefox”.  This will not only display the currently installed version, but also prompt you to update if you aren’t running the newest build.

Now, in the address bar, type “about:config” and hit “Enter”.  If this is the first time you have accessed these settings then you may be surprised by a pop-up message that will warn you about making any changes.  Don’t panic, just click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”

In the search bar type “pdfjs.disabled” and then right click this option.  In the context menu choose “Toggle” to change the setting from “True” to “False”. You can alternatively double-click the entry.

 

You have now enabled the the PDF reader in Firefox.  Browse to a site that has a “.PDF” extension and try it out.  We have high hopes that this will solve the previously mentioned security woes that came with Adobe and perhaps make the browsing experience a bit faster as well.

Adobe Flash Player 11.4 released

Adobe today has released Flash Player 11.4.402.265 to the public for all supported operating systems. What’s interesting for Firefox users is that Adobe appears to have fixed the losing focus bug in the browser that we have reported on yesterday. The bug basically removed focus from the Firefox window under certain circumstances, which meant that any activity, like writing, was interrupted as well. I tried to reproduce the error and did not notice that Flash Player was moving focus away from the browser.

 

Flash Player 11.4 downloads are already available on the official Get Flash Player website, but not on the Adobe Flash Player Support Center site. It is likely that Adobe will update the pages over the course of the day so that you can download the latest version of the application from there as well.

Please note that an optional McAfee Security Scan Plus download is checked on the Get Flash Player download page. If you do not want the software, make sure you uncheck the offer before you click on the download button.

 

The release notes have not been updated yet. If you look at the Flash Player 11.4 beta release notes you find the following new features listed there:

• 
  ActionScript Workers – With the introduction of Workers to ActionScript and the Flash Runtime, Flash Developers can now offload certain tasks like high-latency operations and long-running computations to “Background Workers”. These Background Workers run concurrently in order to leverage more machine resources and avoid things like UI freezes.
  


• 
  Stage3D ”constrained” profile for increased GPU reach – The Flash Player will gate the use of hardware acceleration based on the date of your video card’s driver. In previous releases, we gated support to drivers older than January 1, 2008. In this release, we will be changing the gating to apply to drivers older than January 1, 2006. Content using wmode=direct (or renderMode=direct for AIR) should be hardware accelerated on graphics card driver date newer than 1/1/2006 when possible. This applies to Stage3D and [StageVideo|StageVideo] APIs. In addition to that, we added a new profile for Stage3D called “constrained” profile, allowing your content to run hardware accelerated on the previously blacklisted Intel GMA chipsets.
  


• 
  Sandbox Bridge support – Sandbox bridging allows specific ActionScript objects or functions to be exposed between SWF-to-SWF cross-domain communication.
  


• 
  LZMA support for ByteArray – In addition to zlib compression of ByteArray, we are introducing an additional compression type based on LZMA to compress data inside a ByteArray through ByteArray.compress() and ByteArray.uncompress()
  


• 
  StageVideo attachCamera/Camera improvements – This feature exposes a new method on StageVideo objects that allows the Actionscript code to direct the video stream from the camera to a StageVideo object thus leveraging the GPU for rendering instead of the rasterizer. This allows the player to be much faster when processing a video stream from the camera when GPU acceleration is available.
  


• 
  Compressed texture with alpha support for Stage3D – Transparent images are now supported for compressed textures (ATF file format).
  


• 
  Licensing support: Flash Player Premium Features for Gaming – supports licensing for the combined use of domain memory (used by some third party tools and the Project “Alchemy” C/C++ compiler) with Stage3D hardware acceleration in Flash Player
  

On Windows, you can also check for updates from the Flash Player control panel applet. Just open the Control Panel and there the Flash Player applet. Switch to the advanced tab and click on the check now button there to check for the update. This opens a web page in your default browser that is checking whether you have got the latest version of Flash installed. The page is not yet listing Flash Player 11.4 as the latest available version, so your best bet is to download the plugin directly from the page linked above.

 

losing focus bug in the browser that we have reported on yesterday. The bug basically removed focus from the Firefox window under certain circumstances, which meant that any activity, like writing, was interrupted as well. I tried to reproduce the error and did not notice that Flash Player was moving focus away from the browser.