Firefox 14, the current Firefox version in the nightly channel, gets an awesome feature: an integrated PDF reader powered by PDF.js. This means that the users can open and view PDF files in the Firefox without any third-party tool like Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader plug-ins.

PDF.js is a project of Mozilla to build an efficient PDF rendering application without native code assistance. PDF.js uses HTML5 to render PDF files right in the browser. It is an open source project available on github, hence other browser vendors and application developers are free to implement this in their applications.

Here are two screenshots of the newly introduced native PDF Viewer in the Firefox 14, which installs itself as an extension:

Of course, this native PDF viewer of Firefox currently offers very few functionalities, but we hope to see more options in the future releases. We found its rendering process faster than the Adobe’s plug-in. Moreover, it works for the local PDF files as well. To try this, along with other features of Firefox 14, install the latest nightly build of Firefox from here. This PDF viewer is already available as a stand-alone extension in the AMO, which is compatible with the Firefox 11 too.