I guess this is gonna be a stupid question, because everyone here seems to just “know” that we warn when a link we post is to a .pdf file. So I suspect that the answer is somewhere very obvious and I have missed it. Oh, well, it’s been a while since we had a good pile on here; I’ll volunteer, Sarge!
So what problem might someone have when clicking on a link to a .pdf file? FWIW, I’ve never had my computer or display do anything untoward when I do this, and I’ve opened a lot of them through a linky.
Because PDF files can be large, and are opened by another application. Therefore when you click on a link, it will do much more than just go to another web page. People do not like to be surprised by clicking on a link that takes a minute or so to load and brings up another app in the process. It’s not so much a real warning as a heads-up.
Its not necessarily that PDFs are large, but the damn acrobat plugin is a slow and bloaty app. Youre looking at several seconds to just start it on top of the file download time.
The real solution is to get browser makers to default to downloading a pdf instead of attempting to display it inline with a plugin.
In the meantime, I find using foxit is a good compromise. Its faster than acrobat and seems more stable.
I read that pdfs are now the biggest virus/trojan vector on the internet. MAcrobat is such a unsecure application that it has quite a few buffer overflow exploits. Its advised that users go into preferences and disabled javascript or switch to Foxit.
Another interesting observation based on your username… imagine if you have internet access on an airplane. While it’s convenient to browse the web in the flight, the bandwidth is very low – pages load slowly. Imagine you inadvertently clicked on a mega megabyte PDF without realizing it. Clicking on a PDF without warning could be annoying to some folks.
The problem is that people are still using Adobe Reader for reading their PDFs, and Adobe Reader is slllooooowwww. I don’t know why more people don’t use the incredibly fast Foxit reader. It makes PDFs a much smaller concern.
I’m new and not versed in the ettiquette of the forums here, but I can tell you from personal experience that not all browsers deal with PDF’s the same way. On my desktop Mac, in Safari, they’re rendered just like a webpage, but on my laptop running Ubuntu Linux, in Chrome, they are automatically downloaded, which sort of annoys me.
Which is precisely the reason for warning about PDFs. Before Acrobat 7 came along, clicking on a big PDF file by accident pretty much meant I had to go get coffee and chat with some co-workers before my computer became usable again.
Not necessarily - I’m pretty sure .asp and .php links can end up opening a non-html target - in fact, I think it’s possible not to even have an extension in the URL - depending on how the web server is configured
