How can I view PDF files within Firefox 3 (FF3)?

I also upgraded to Firefox 3.0 (you can if you haven't: Get Firefox) and am impressed. It's clearly quite a bit faster, particularly on sites that are based around AJAX, the asynchronous Javascript-based Web sites we've allo grown to love. Since I spend so much time within Google Gmail, that's where I have most quickly seen the improvement, but generally the entire Web experience feels more snappy.

However there are tradeoffs with any upgrade, whether you were running Firefox 2.0, Safari, a Firefox offshoot like Flock or something completely different. One of those tradeoffs is that, out of the box, Firefox 3 does not allow you to view PDFs within the Web browser environment.

Fortunately, there's a nice little free plugin you can download and install that gives you just this capability, as highlighted almost immediately after FF3 release by The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

In a nutshell, start by going to Firefox-Mac-PDF, a page on the quite interesting Google Code project, which is intended to be a repository for open source and public domain software.

Click on "install now" on that page (I don't want to link to it because I'll end up pointing to older versions of the code, not the latest) and you'll promptly see one of the many reasons to appreciate Firefox:

To get beyond this, click on "Allow" and you'll see this confirmation window:

Looks like what we want, so click on "Install Now" and you'll see:

Reboot, as it indicates, and you'll see this:

(confusingly, it's not 1Password that I just installed, but that just shows up first).

Once you close the window the next time you go to a URL that's a PDF you'll find that it appears within the browser. Want to test it? This is a PDF link: click it.