Full Speed

[ April 22, 2004 ]

A Browser Wish

I really hate PDF links on websites. I’m talking about the kind of PDF link that doesn’t warn you that you are about to download a PDF file. This is mostly because I really don’t like waiting for Acrobat Pro to load. It’s an enormous example of bloatware. Adobe should probably fix that problem, but I’m sure there is a simpler workaround.

My idea involves using a bit of DHTML to display a PDF icon near the pointer when it is hovering over a PDF link, similar to Nice Titles. It seems that the Nice Titles script could probably be extended to do this without much effort, but I haven’t really looked through the code yet.

Has anyone seen anything similar to this out there? And better yet: Does anyone know how this type of functionality might be added to Firefox?

Update: I’ve modified Phil’s idea below a slight bit to forge a workable temporary solution. The following is now in my userContent.css file:

a[href$=".pdf"]:hover:after {
  content: " [pdf]";
  color: red;
}

© 2014 Scott Johnson (info)
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