PDF Browser Plugin turns your web browser into the best PDF viewer available. PDF Browser Plugin displays Quartz compatible PDF documents within web browsers. With the help of PDF Browser Plugin you can view PDF documents directly in your web browser, print them, and save them to disk if you’d like to keep them.
PDF Browser Plugin 2 is free for private use at home for not-for-profit activities and for use at educational institutions for not-for-profit activities.
The US$69 site license is valid for all computers of a single organization within a 5-mile perimeter.
MacDailyNews highly recommends this Plugin. More info and download link here.
Related MacDailyNews article:
View PDFs directly in Apple’s Safari with free ‘PDF Browser Plugin’ – February 03, 2004
I’ve had this installed for a couple of months now. It is much better than the older v1.0.3 as you can browse the PDF properly using a toolbar.
Great news … no need for Aggro’bat.
I have been using this for a while and it’s great. Ask your doctor if PDF Browser Plugin 2 is right for you.
tell me again why safari won’t do pdfs just on its own like other browsers?
i like safari but i dont get that if apple’s all about pdf like they say.
I love the new plug-in.
Nice and convenient plug-in but there is no way to search the document. “Find” does not work with it.
Originally, PDF was the preferred format for internet webpages, but the file sizes were too large for the vast numbers of dial-up users. This is due to a PDF’s having embedded the font set and hi-res graphics being used in the document so the viewer/reader can see it exactly as the author had intended (that’s why they look so nice). PDF remains the standard for professional publishing, but HTML was adopted for the internet (sigh!). While the files are small, the quality is obviously missing; limited fonts, low-res graphics, and worst of all is Microsoft’s inability to follow industry standards (http://www.w3c.org).
Aryugaetu,
Click on the diamond, and you have it shown on the preview without downloading it on the desktop.. then you can do your search.
Uh, I would like to know the big deal about this plugin. Preview can display PDFs very fast, much faster than Acrobat can. Why would I want to browse PDFs in Safari? What is the huge advantage of doing this?
I’m with KK on this one. I don’t see the point. Preview displays PDFs, gives you a thumbnail index, allows scaling and paging, all that good stuff. The only good thing I can think of about a plugin would be not having to download PDFs to view them, but on my DSL that saves me what? A second or two?
Funny how coincidences work; I just deleted PDF Browser Plug-In 1.1, then happened upon this blog. I found that because Apple’s Preview program works so well for PDFs, it is all I need. Click a PDF on a web site and it launches Preview, same in Mail, quick, clean, and Preview has all the setting choices I need.
kk, Ryan.. the one point that you both miss is that you don’t have to download it on your desktop to view it. to use preview you must download (unless there’s a plugin that apple ships with OS X), to use this you don’t have to download.
IT guy, thanks for the info. I did not know that aspect of the plugin. I guess that might be usefull if you are on a slow connection. Pretty cool.
I agree with IT guy; I prefer to have my desktop uncluttered with a bunch of downloaded PDF files, so this plugin has been a real timesaver for casual PDF viewing. I’m happy to hear they’ve released a new version. Incidentally, they also released a new version of their Word doc plugin as well…
rogozhin, the word plugin has been available for a while, however, it removes formatting though.. so it looks simply like a rich text..
Of course you have to download the whole file, even if you’re using the plugin. It downloads it to /tmp, so you won’t have to erase it later on.
I find that PREVIEW is the best PDF viewer, why clutter my system with more add-on-ware when Preview does it just fine?
Hi,
I thought I would try this an downloaded it. I tried to drag the white imation type zip drive to put it into the library/internet plug in as stated by the instructions. The installer ? stayed on the desk top and only allowed a copy to be placed in the internet plug ins folder.
So restarted the iMac ( panther) selected safari and it is exactly the same as it was before this download. A PDF browser plug in is loacted in the aforesaid folder.
What am I doing wrong?
Thx
George UK
> Originally, PDF was the preferred format for internet webpages
When was this the preferred format? And who expressed this preference?
pdf files sitting on your desktop?
why?
file the damn things, if you need to keep them,
in a nice organized filing system.
There’s a prevalent myth that browsers show you pages without “downloading” them, because people think “download” refers only to files which are kept indefinitely. “Download” actually refers to any transfer of data from the server to the client — and all web pages, displayed graphics, PDFs, and anything else displayed by the browser must be downloaded.
Downloading the entire PDF is necessary to view it — the only difference between viewing it with the Plug-In and viewing it through Preview/Acrobat, is where the file is downloaded to — the temporary “cache” area, or the user’s preferred permanent download location.
The chief benefit of using the Plug-In is in having fewer running applications, which was more important in Mac OS 9 than in Mac OS X, but can still be useful in some situations.
A seconday benefit can be that you don’t have to manually throw out the PDF once viewed, if you don’t want to save it. How much benefit there is to this, depends on how many PDFs you read and don’t need or want to keep. In my case, most PDFs worth reading, are worth retaining for later reference.
Be seeing you.
no scroll wheel support is a shame