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Hello,
Our users noticed a change when viewing PDFs in their SharePoint Online document library. Occurred Monday 4/8/24.
They have it set up where when you click on the document from the library, it brings it up with the SharePoint Online PDF Viewer, it does not open in a new tab, and that's the way we prefer. With the viewer, you can click on the info button to bring up the info pane on the right, and you can edit your metadata from there.
They noticed several things.
-The background is now black, like in a dark mode, thats what initially tipped them off that something has changed.
-The info button is no longer available, it is now buried in the ... menu on the top left.
-It is now EXTERMELY slow to load. When they click on the next arrow to view the next PDF, it is very slow to load and also the info pane is very slow to load.
-When they filter or sort the library, and then start viewing the PDFs, it does not bring them up in the same order as the filter/sort. It's completely different.
I as the IT admin, have tried many things to improve performance, here's some notes.
-Not everyone has this new viewer experience. The older experience has a white background, and also the info button. See screenshots to see the difference.
-I am able to reproduce the slowness on other test pcs, though there are a few that seem to load fine.
-I have cleared browser cache, cookies
-Tried with different user accounts
-Tried with private browsers, and tried with Edge Firefox, and Chrome.
-Tried using a hotspot to be on a different network
I have opened up a ticket to Microsoft, but no response yet. I have also not seen any announcement of this change.
Has anyone else noticed this? Any workarounds or suggestions? Any way to roll back to the old viewer? (wishful thinking). I'm wondering if laptop specs are factoring in, which would surprise me because it's basically just web browsing here.
Thanks!
nick
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Thanks, Emanuele. Have the next and previous arrow buttons been added back as well?
Hi John,
I am the product manager for the file viewer I apologize for this, we found an issue with the search and filter functionality that was affecting the file viewer. We deployed a solution that should fix the problem but let us know if you are still experiencing any issues.
Best,
Emanuele
I am currently at Tier 2 support on my Ticket with this. I am re-explaining the issue. I have been pointing them to this thread and others are evidence it's not a localized issue.
For any of the devs or support folks that find their way here, I absolutely love the product and have been working with it since MOSS 07. I am not trying to beat up on the SP team, this is just a mistake that needs a quick reversal or fix. Mistakes happen. Looking at how the old viewer handles caching it seems that the issue is with the RenderListDataAsStream js function or something downstream from that. This issue is obviously not intentional as the same controls are present in the new viewer that handle the functions of forward/back navigation etc. These just do not work as they should in the new viewer.
Thanks for the backup, John. Hoping others will too and help create some movement on this issue.
I have also commented:-
New PDF view has broken filtering and views · Community (microsoft.com)
I have one reply from one tenants support call which reads "I have escalated your issue to the Senior escalation team and I am checking with them" I have no idea what that means!