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It’s Sunday morning, I’ve barely finished my coffee and here’s an email pitch to check out a site – vendor supported but neutral resource, blah, blah … hm… dunno… Oh, well, let’s spend 5 minutes.
Click, click, nice design, Web 2.0-ish, lightweight, easy to view – until I click another page button, which doesn’t point to a regular web page. It’s a damn Adobe PDF document. And it just killed my Firefox.
<rant>
Now, don’t get me wrong. PDF is a very useful format, about the only widely used, reliable and universal one to digitally archive documents, and there are a number of other valid business and legal reasons to use it. But simply slapping a PDF on a website when the content is perfectly suitable for a native web page is just sloppy practice. Even worse is when there’s no indication that a particular button or link leads to PDF.
Whether you use the latest Acrobat Reader or lightweight solutions like Foxit, sooner or later you will inevitably experience Death by PDF: your browser freezes, and it’s not just the active tab, it’s the whole damn thing until you forcibly shut it down. (CTRL-Alt-Del and can take minutes.)
I’ve had it. I declare war on unnecessary PDFs online. Is there a quick and easy don’t-come-back-here add-on to Firefox?
</rant>
So besides the annoyance of the over-use of PDF’s as direct links (with which I agree,) you ARE aware of the Adobe exploit in the wild currently with no patch?
Chances are your browser potentially crashed because you just got owned…
/Hoff
Of course, that’s why I linked to several related posts discussing this exploit.
But my annoyance is longer term… exploit or not, sticking PDFs up instead of creating proper pages is just lazyness, and doing it without a warning is even worse. In fact any navigational button that invokes an external app instead of just displaying a page should be clearly differentiated from the regular ones.