First, I should say that the PDF Browser Plugin is great at most of what it does. And it works well in Camino with one tab, or in Safari with one or many tabs. But for some reason, it doesn't work when I need it -- in Camino with multiple tabs.

Now I will commence a general rant about the state of tabbed browsing with PDFs on Mac OS X. All I want is to be able to click on PDF links, have them show up in a browser tab, and then scroll through them with the scroll bar or hand tool. There are several ways this should be possible, but none of them really work.

Safari 2 does this great, on its own or with the PDF Browser Plugin. But Safari seems to get awfully slow after it's been open for a couple of days, and won't speed up unless I restart it. I usually keep a lot of windows and tabs open for several different projects, and come back to them over the course of several days. It's very inconvenient to have to close all this down at an arbitrary time and then start again to get Safari working correctly.

So I use Camino, which starts fast and stays fast. But when I use the PDF Browser Plugin in Camino, I get big trouble. If I have PDFs open in two or more tabs of the same browser window, the PDF Browser Plugin seems to get confused about where the boundaries of the window are drawn. If I scroll using the scroll bar, scroll wheel, or by dragging the PDF image around, the PDF Browser Plugin fills the screen with junk so I can't read the page (it redraws stuff from near the edge of the window repeatedly over the window as I scroll). The only way to scroll safely is to use the scroll arrows, or click above or below the scroll thumb. It works, but it's slow. If I have to scroll a lot, I have to pop up the PDF in Preview. Which is tricky too, because the PDF Browser Plugin loses track of where the "diamond" button is between the time when I click down and click up.

Please, someone make a reliable way to view PDFs in tabs in a Mac OS X web browser!