Useful reminder: you can set "pdfjs.disabled" in about:config to turn it off and redirect PDFs to a native app of your choice.
The concept of rendering PDFs in the browser isn't fundamentally bad, but large files crashing the browser is a disaster. This happened with Adobe as a plugin and it continues to happen.
Now if someone can provide a means of un-embedding streaming video as well, that would be very useful.
This is pretty risky as native PDF readers are among the most targeted malware infection vectors. At least make sure you don't have Adobe Reader if you decide to risk this.
> you can set "pdfjs.disabled" in about:config to turn it off
Already do that. Bonus: I'm on a laptop intermittently without internet access, and can open up PDFs to read offline without having them be lost when my browser crashes.
> Now if someone can provide a means of un-embedding streaming video as well, that would be very useful.
Really hard to do, unfortunately. For HTML5 video, maybe (and I'd love it if someone came up with something of the sort), but for flash video the problem is that there isn't really any standard for flash video players, so you can't really parse the flash file to figure out what video to play without running it.
That being said, maybe some sort of local proxy that recognizes when a video file is requested by flash and reports a 404 to it, with a popup "do you wish to open this link in a local player". But that way lies madness.
This could, perhaps, initially be implemented as a plugin that inspected/listened for link clicks and forwarded them to your application of choice. I believe VLC is capable of opening streams without too much hassle (not sure about other players).
Just a hint: "pdfjs.disabled" is hard switch off and it makes it harder to recover native PDF plugin viewing capability. Switching using Preferences/Options->Applications makes it easier. Try it and stop complaining that you don't have a choice :)
The concept of rendering PDFs in the browser isn't fundamentally bad, but large files crashing the browser is a disaster. This happened with Adobe as a plugin and it continues to happen.
Now if someone can provide a means of un-embedding streaming video as well, that would be very useful.