Revamped PDF Experience

This week we are proud to announce a brand new, polished hand crafted PDF browser in Poly, that lets you edit, organize, and fill out PDFs straight from your Poly browser.

PDF viewing is consistently the most widely used feature of Poly, and we knew that our prior version of the PDF browser wasn’t what we wanted. What we wanted (and then built) was a design-consistent, beautiful, fast, and flexible PDF application that works across browsers and platforms on every OS. Best of all, it reduces rather than expands the size of the overall app bundle, with PDF rendering loaded lazily rather than bloating every page load.

We will continue to ship improvements to our PDF application such as comments, annotations, markup, signatures, better agent support, and more. However, we’re excited to continue on this mission to make Poly a fast, feature-rich general file browsing application that does everything you expect and a lot that you couldn’t imagine.

🧹 Improvements

• We’ve made page load and rendering improvements across the app, with a massive increase in page load speed for first-load, and removing bloat from our preloading logic.

🐞 Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where importing too many font-type files could cause the system to crash
• Fixed an issue where loading the app in safari would not automatically direct you to the home page when already logged in
• We fixed several issues that could cause race conditions in the app, or cause the cached offline versions of your file system to not look like the servers, especially when listing large folders
• Reverted our audio waveform algorithm which was causing delays and other issues — a later fix will address oddness in the waveform
• Fixed an issue with the desktop app on Windows which was causing all app installs and updates to crash
• Added a fix to our styling which was previously causing some components to have their styles overridden unintentionally
• Reduced the app bundle size by removing unused assets
• Folder icons should now load the correct size and sharpness. Some folder icons were tweaked for smaller sizes
• Prevented some kinds of actions such as remote imports from causing a crash-retry loop
• We fixed and are continuing to address issues with our linux build that cause issues across various distros, especially with regard to graphics drivers.