Hi Hraban,
Unfortunately, Firefox doesn’t register itself as a PDF viewer (at least on MacOS), that means I can’t use it easily to open a PDF from the command line (e.g. in scripts).
That's odd. You can set it as the default PDF viewer on Windows and Linux at least.
for forms: - fill in Yes.
Just checked again with current Firefox: It doesn’t work with all of my test files.
I tested it with the eforms manual: http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/acrotex/doc/eformman.pdf and it seems to work fine for me. I've also used it to fill out a few government forms in the past and it's worked too. Unfortunately, I think that there are like 12 incompatible ways of making a form in PDF, so support probably heavily depends on how the document was made.
- print documents with/without form contents Yes.
I couldn’t find an option to print without form contents. (But usually you would want filled forms, so “with” is ok.)
Well if you refresh the page, you can delete everything that you've filled in :)
- custom checkmarks/radiobuttons should work & display correctly
Usually it works, sometimes it doesn't.
- JS for calculations
Usually it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Need to check further...
I checked with the eforms manual linked above. Check marks and radio buttons seem to work, but calculations don't.
for annotations (correction workflow; generally just nice to have): - similar to Adobe/Foxit Reader
Reading annotations works, but you can't modify anything.
Ok. There’s still no PDF viewer on Linux that can handle annotations well. (But even Acrobat Reader on MacOS frequently crashes on them; I’m using Foxit Reader for annotations, but the one for Linux is too old.)
Microsoft Edge has decent PDF annotation support. I've never tested it on Linux, but a Linux version does exist. Okular also lets you add some annotations.
I've been using pdf.js almost exclusively for the past few years either via Firefox or VS Code, and I've never really had any problems. The only real issue that I've had is that it gets fairly slow with documents over a few thousand pages long. Otherwise, it seems pretty fast and stable, and it supports nearly every feature that I tend to need.
Well, documents with thousands of pages are probably unreliable/slow in most viewers.
I've got a 1.1GB document with 16000 pages, and Okular handles it just as fast as a 10 page document. Firefox at least manages to not crash when opening the document, which is better than most viewers. Okular is actually a pretty nice viewer in general. It's really fast, and it also seems to support most of these features. The tricky thing with it though is that I think that it would be much harder to modify compared to pdf.js. -- Max