Firefox tests faster PDF viewing with hardware acceleration in Nightly

Mozilla is turning on hardware acceleration for PDF.js in Firefox Nightly 149.0, and the change could make many PDF files open much faster inside the browser.

PDF.js is the built-in viewer Firefox uses to display documents without requiring a separate app or extension. When large or image-heavy PDFs load slowly, the delay often comes from the browser handling rendering work on the CPU. Hardware acceleration moves more of that work to the GPU, which can draw pages, images, and text more quickly.

Built-in PDF viewers have become a standard part of modern browsers. They let documents open instantly without separate software. Performance limits in these viewers are most noticeable with long or graphics-rich files, where slow rendering can interrupt reading or scrolling.

Because of this change, users opening long reports, scanned documents, or graphics-heavy files may notice pages render sooner and scrolling feels more responsive. The improvement applies to PDFs viewed inside Firefox rather than files opened in external readers.

For now, the feature is limited to Firefox Nightly, where Mozilla tests early changes before public rollout. Performance behavior may still change during this stage, and availability in the stable version will depend on testing results.

Faster in-browser PDF viewing addresses a common problem. Many people use the browser as their primary document reader, especially on systems where installing extra software is limited. Shorter load times and quicker rendering can make everyday tasks such as reading forms, research papers, or manuals noticeably easier.

If testing is successful, faster PDF loading could improve document viewing in a future Firefox release.