PDF speed boost on Safari

The latest stats are in: about half of you are using Safari on Macs. If you're in that half, we've got a suggestion for how you can get your PDFs even faster: use Safari's native PDF viewer.

A little background: To display PDFs, your web browser uses a bit of code called a PDF viewer. Most of you are probably familiar with the one Adobe makes, called Acrobat. Acrobat's got some nice touches, like the toolbar that appears across the top of the window that has buttons for emailing, saving, printing and so forth (see Pubget's help for details). But it can be pretty slow, especially the first time it launches. Also, it can glitch when you switch between PDFs: you get a black screen where the PDF should be and have to reload the page to fix it. We've noticed this more on the Mac than on the PC.

Since Pubget is all about speed, we recommend a faster alternative to Acrobat: using Safari's own PDF viewer. You don't get the toolbar, but it can do pretty much everything Acrobat can do; it just works a bit differently (again, see Pubget's help for details). So, Mac users, here's how you tell Safari to use its own PDF viewer instead of Acrobat in two easy steps.

1. First, go to the Finder and go to the /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ directory. The quickest way to do that is through the menu bar (Go -> Go to Folder..., then type in "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/", then hit enter).

2. Then, if you're using Acrobat, you'll see a file called "AdobePDFViewer.plugin". That's Acrobat. You DO NOT want to delete it (in case you want to go back to it later); you just want to disable it. (If you do delete it, you'll have to download a new free copy from Adobe.) To disable it, in the "Internet Plug-Ins" folder, make a new folder called "Disabled Plug-Ins" (File -> New Folder) and move the file "AdobePDFViewer.plugin" to that new folder. (Note that if your Mac was set up by an administrator, it might not let you do this; you'll have to get your administrator to do it for you. But usually it will let you do this yourself.) For those of you using the Schubert-IT PDF viewer plugin, you'll also have to move the "PDF Browser Plugin.plugin" file to the "Disabled Plug-Ins" folder you just made. (If you don't have that file, no worries; it just means you don't use the Schubert-IT plugin.)

That's it! Now just restart Safari, go to Pubget, and PDF loading and switching should be even faster. And if you miss the PDF toolbar and want to go back to Acrobat, all you have to do is move the AdobePDFViewer.plugin back out of Disabled Plug-Ins and into Internet Plug-Ins, restart Safari again, and it's done. Hope this helps!