Firefox 19 available

One of the main novelties of version 19 is that it incorporates a pdf viewer, so that it is not necessary to download anything extra when you open this type of document on the network. Some were also improved developer tools and support for HTML5.


On February 19, Mozilla officially presented the launch of the Firefox 19 browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Improvements in the new version of Firefox include a built-in PDF viewer, Android theme support, and reduced minimum CPU requirements to allow it to be used on a greater number of smartphones.

The most substantial improvement in this version is PDF.js, a JavaScript library for converting PDF files to HTML 5, developed by the Mozilla Research Lab. Technically, the tool was already available in Firefox 18, released about a month and a half ago, but it needed to be activated manually.

The key point of the integrated PDF viewer is that it avoids having to use closed source plug-ins, which "could potentially expose users to security vulnerabilities," according to Mozilla. Additionally, it reduces the size of Firefox, since PDF viewing plugins have their own code for drawing images and text.

PDF.js loads and processes PDF files directly in the browser faster, as it uses HTML5, and can work on various platforms: computers, tablets, and phones.


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  1.   gowend132 said

    What you say is not entirely true, in Ubuntu Firefox it looks great and the title bar that usually appears in other distros does not appear, unless you do not want to use Ubuntu.

  2.   Jerome Navarro said

    Exit exits, if you raise the mouse to the upper multipurpose bar. That is integration by the OS and not the application. Damn Mozilla! I also use it because in E17 Chromium it has rendering problems (and because I love it very much: p)

  3.   riocanterlot said

    Well at least so far it seems that the problem that made in some fixed tabs that I had, firefox occupy 500 Mb has been fixed

  4.   pzero said

    I've already tried it and it scared me to death. Used to seeing them in Evince, I suddenly saw a pdf in the browser and thought it was in Explorer. I hardly recover

  5.   Diego Silverberg said

    Is it me or are browsers like firefox on their way to being huge software hubs?
    firefox already has to watch videos
    read pdf's
    it has plugins to have word processors ...

  6.   juo said

    How good! Hopefully Chromium will implement it so as not to use the Chrome library)

  7.   Manuel Guirado said

    Cool! We will have to try it then! Maybe I'll stop using so much Chromium ...

  8.   Jerome Navarro said

    The day they remove the title bar in Linux, I go straight to Firefox. For now I use it in Window $ only (and preferentially).