Ever since upgrad­ing to Tiger, I’ve been con­sis­tently annoyed by one fea­ture (there are others, but this one really irks me). I hate the way Safari dis­plays PDF file inline.

First of all, it’s incred­i­bly slow. At least once a day I find myself click­ing on a PDF link and then being stopped dead in the water for what feels like an eter­nity. While Safari is load­ing an PDF file, I’m unable to browse in any other tab or window.

The worst part is that I know and under­stand that this will happen each time, yet I keep doing it. Apple’s doc­u­men­ta­tion sug­gests the following:

If you still prefer Pre­view, simply Control-​click the PDF link (or right click on a two-​button mouse) and choose Down­load Linked File from the short­cut menu. Once the file is on your desk­top, double-​click it to open in Preview.

The prob­lem is, I don’t always know that I’m click­ing on a PDF link to begin with. For exam­ple, I was check­ing out the Quark 7 beta site today. I clicked on an unas­sum­ing link titled “ReadMe File.” Sud­denly I found my browser com­pletely stalled as I real­ized that a dreaded PDF was loading.

Even when I am fully aware that I’m attempt­ing to view a PDF file, I don’t always remem­ber that I need to Control-​click or Option-​click on the link. It’s usu­ally only after Safari has stalled while the page tries to load that I think to myself, “Oh yes, I should have remem­bered to Control-​click that link and then have selected Down­load Linked File from the con­tex­tual menu.”

Even beyond the slow factor, which per­haps can be attrib­uted to my aging G4 Power­Book (seems a stretch though), the final result isn’t even sat­is­fac­tory. When I open, a PDF file in a browser, I usu­ally just want to look at it dammit. I don’t need all of those fancy Acro­bat but­tons. If I decide I want to do some­thing fur­ther to the doc­u­ment, I’m going to save it any­ways and open Adobe Acro­bat to edit it.

Also, the files open up so tiny that I can’t ever read them. I’m con­stantly having to change the view, zoom, or resize my browser window. Resiz­ing my browser window works, but then that messes up my work­flow. I like the browser win­dows a cer­tain size, just big enough to dis­play all of most web pages.

All of this simply comes down to user pref­er­ences. I’m sure that there are many people out there who com­pletely dis­agree with me and love this fea­ture in Safari. I’ll admit, before Safari offered it, I was con­stantly irri­tated that it wasn’t even an option. I’m def­i­nitely not argu­ing against having this fea­ture. Before this whole dis­play­ing PDF inline busi­ness, if you clicked on a PDF link in Safari, it would auto­mat­i­cally down­load and then open in Pre­view. It was some­what coun­ter­in­tu­itive, but I have to say, once I got used to it, I liked that feature.

Pre­view is a great light­weight appli­ca­tion that does a small number of things well. I like how easily the size of the doc­u­ment changes when you increase the size of the window, with­out having to mess with my browser window size. It’s fast. I can zoom in when appro­pri­ate, and for the love of god, I don’t have to stare at those ugly Acro­bat icons.

All of this would be a rather triv­ial annoy­ance if Safari just included how it dis­plays PDFs as a pref­er­ence item. I’ve been search­ing, but I haven’t been able to find this one yet. I should be a be able to either check a box to dis­play PDFs inline, or chose what appli­ca­tion opens them auto­mat­i­cally. Sug­gest­ing that I simply Control-​click or Option-​click just isn’t enough. In my opin­ion, Apple just got it plain wrong on this one.

I find this all pretty ridicu­lous, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that around the same time Apple also intro­duced the fea­ture that allows RSS feeds to be read inside Safari. It’s a cool fea­ture that I tried out. I quickly decided that I didn’t like it nearly as much as Net­NewsWire Lite, so I checked out the pref­er­ences. Sure enough, there was an option to set what­ever appli­ca­tion I wanted to use as my default RSS aggregator.

Apple got it right with the RSS fea­ture. Why didn’t they apply the same logic to inline PDFs? I want to have the option to use all of these fea­tures within Safari, but I wan’t the option to opt out of them as well.