1893483 - Separate PDF Viewer activity

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(GeckoView :: PDF Viewer, enhancement)

Description

[zesanup]

Steps to reproduce:

Opened a PDF with Fenix set as default PDF viewer.

Actual results:

The PDF opens eventually, but the browser can take some time to start up.

On low RAM devices, it can also cause other app processes to be killed, or get killed itself if space is low. This isn't a problem when you're intending to use just the browser, but PDFs are often interacted with while other apps are open, and having them all ejected from RAM can be very problematic.

Expected results:

Can the PDF viewer be completely separated from the main app? As in, opening a PDF link in Fenix would start a separate 'PDF Viewer' activity instead of simply opening a new tab, and you could switch between the two via the Recent Apps switcher.

What I'm envisioning is that opening a local PDF in Fenix would open the PDF Viewer activity only, without starting the main browser. I've seen this behaviour in the Google Drive app's PDF viewer, where any PDF would open near instantly in a separate activity (com.google.android.apps.viewer.PdfViewerActivity), while the main Drive app itself (com.google.android.apps.docs) was quite slow to load.

Instead of waiting for the whole browser (and extensions) to fire up, just launching pdf.js as a separate activity would be faster, and eat much less RAM, too.

The Drive PDF viewer is very lightweight, especially compared to the main app. Opening a PDF in Firefox is quite cumbersome by comparison.