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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>