Google Doc Viewer

Google Docs has the functionality to render PDF/PPT documents into HTML webpages on the fly. If you have attachments in GMail, you might have seen this already. Now, Google has opened this for any document on the web.

Just add your document URL after "http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=",

for e.g. http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf.

Having http://, www prefixes before the URL doesn't hurt.

The Greasemonkey addon for Firefox & its equivalents for other browsers go one step ahead. This script modifies each document link automatically with the viewer prefix.

Firefox crashing with Adobe PDF plugin

I had struggled for quite a while with the way Mozilla Firefox would crash each time I tried to open a PDF document - I always had to save the link independently and then open the doc. The default behavior of in-browser opening of the document was the problem, it seemed. So here is how you solve it.

From the Firefox menu, go to Tools->Options. There, on the Applications tab, you will find a long list of applications/document types and what is supposed to be used to open each of those. It would look like this:

In there, like I've shown here, find the Adobe Acrobat documents and instead of "Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox)", select "Adobe Acrobat Reader", i.e. the program itself. If that does not show up by default, select "Other", and browse to find Adobe Acrobat Reader.

There you go - no more crashes! :)